Democrats accused of corruption are seeking relief from President Trump as he hands out scores of pardons and drops charges against his political allies amid his crusade against the justice system that made him a convicted felon.

Trump has portrayed the legal reprieves as the unraveling of an era of political prosecutions steered by former President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), which Trump assailed as weaponized against him while marred by his own legal troubles.

Now, some Democrats tangled in their own web of legal problems may be looking to Trump for some legal relief.

Chief among them may be Bob Menendez, who served 18 years as a powerful Democratic senator from blue state New Jersey.

“President Trump was right,” Menendez said Wednesday after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for accepting lavish bribes in exchange for his political clout. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”

Menendez, who was found guilty on all 16 counts he faced, including bribery and acting as a foreign agent of Egypt, is perhaps the first Democrat to publicly align so plainly with Trump’s perception of the U.S. criminal process.

Both politicians stood trial in Manhattan last year, their historic cases unfolding in courthouses just about a block apart. Trump’s conviction marked the first of any former president, and Menendez became the first public official convicted of acting as a foreign agent while in office while serving........

© The Hill