Congress on Trial: Criminal Convictions and Federal Indictments in the Legislature

An investigative examination of the most recent criminal convictions of U.S. lawmakers, and the sitting members of the 119th Congress currently facing federal charges — as of April 2026

A Necessary Clarification Before We Begin

Readers asking about "current members of Congress who have been convicted of crimes" deserve a precise and honest answer — not a list that conflates accusations with verdicts, or mixes former members with sitting ones. So this article begins with a clear statement of fact:

As of April 2026, no sitting member of the 119th Congress holds office while under a standing criminal conviction in a court of law.

That sentence, however, tells only part of the story — and arguably the least alarming part. The reason no currently sitting member is serving under a criminal conviction is not because Congress has become a model of ethical conduct. It is largely because the most recent high-profile congressional criminal convictions — those of Senator Bob Menendez and Representative George Santos — resulted in both men leaving office through resignation and expulsion respectively, in the months surrounding their legal proceedings.

Meanwhile, two sitting members of the current Congress are under active federal criminal indictment and have not been convicted. Their trials are pending. The pipeline of potential future convictions in Congress is very much open.

This article tells the full story: the most recent criminal convictions of sitting members — how they unfolded, what they revealed — and the current legal jeopardy facing members who remain on the House floor today, casting votes, drawing salaries, and representing American constituents while their criminal cases wind through the courts.

The Most Recent Convictions — Members Who Left Office After Being Found Guilty

Gold Bars, Cash in Suit Pockets, and a Foreign Agent

Bob Menendez served three terms as a United States Senator from New Jersey. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — one of the most powerful positions in American government, with direct influence over foreign aid, arms sales, military assistance, and the conduct of American diplomacy around the world. He used that power, federal prosecutors argued, as a personal revenue stream.

In September 2023, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Menendez that was extraordinary even by the standards of congressional corruption cases. The charges alleged that he had accepted bribes in exchange for using his senatorial influence to benefit three New Jersey businessmen, as well as the governments of Egypt and Qatar. The bribes, prosecutors said, were not subtle: FBI agents searching Menendez's New Jersey home found approximately $480,000 in cash — much of it stuffed in envelopes and tucked into the pockets of suits hanging in his closet — along with gold bars whose serial numbers were traceable to his co-conspirators. A Mercedes-Benz convertible had also changed hands.

The scope of the alleged corruption was staggering. Menendez was accused of passing along sensitive information about U.S. Embassy personnel in Cairo to Egyptian officials, of ghostwriting a letter to fellow senators that would lift a hold on military aid to Egypt — a hold placed by another senator who was unaware that Menendez had been compromised — and of using his committee's influence to help a New Jersey businessman secure a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund.

On July 16, 2024, after a nine-week trial in Manhattan federal court, a jury convicted Menendez on all 16 counts. The U.S. Attorney described the verdict as the end of "his years of selling his office to the highest bidder." The case broke multiple records: it was the first time a sitting senator had been convicted of acting as a foreign agent. It was the first time a senator had been convicted of abusing a leadership position on a Senate committee. Menendez had surrendered the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee after his indictment, but he had refused to resign from the Senate itself, even running briefly as an independent candidate before withdrawing from the race.

He resigned from the Senate in August 2024. In January 2025, he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. The sentencing judge, Sidney Stein, told him: "You stood at the apex of our political system. Somewhere along the way, you lost your way."

Menendez's case is notable for several reasons beyond its dramatic facts. It was his second federal criminal trial — he had been indicted in 2015 on separate bribery charges, that case ending in a mistrial and subsequent acquittal on the most serious counts. He returned to full Senate service after that first ordeal, rose again to lead the Foreign Relations Committee, and allegedly returned immediately to the conduct that had originally drawn investigators' attention. The first prosecution, in this reading, did not deter him. It may have emboldened him.

He is appealing his conviction.

The Man Who Made Himself Up

George Santos represents a different genus of congressional criminal — not the entrenched insider selling accumulated power, but the brazen newcomer who lied his way into office in the first place and then looted his own campaign to fund the fiction.

Before Santos was a congressman, he was, by most credible accounts, primarily a fabrication. His campaign biography claimed he had attended Baruch College and New York University — he attended neither. He claimed employment at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup — he had worked at neither. He claimed his mother had been present in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and that she had died years later of cancer caused by the exposure — accounts disputed by public records. He claimed Sephardic Jewish heritage and Holocaust refugee grandparents. He claimed he had produced a Broadway musical.

When The New York Times began methodically dismantling these claims in late 2022, Santos did not resign. He brazenned it out, took his seat in the House of Representatives in January 2023, and continued to deny fabrications even as the evidence piled up.

The criminal charges that followed were less about the biographical lies — lying to voters is not, in itself, a federal crime — and more about what Santos did with money. He was charged with stealing the identities of campaign donors and repeatedly charging their credit cards without authorization. He was charged with falsifying Federal Election Commission filings in coordination with his campaign treasurer, fabricating donor contributions to fraudulently meet the fundraising threshold required to qualify for the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" program — a designation that unlocked significant national party support for his campaign. He collected unemployment benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic while he was actually employed — federal theft. He used campaign funds for personal luxury purchases.

The House Ethics Committee's investigation found he had used donor money at Hermès, for Botox treatments, and for other personal expenses. The report was scathing and bipartisan. In December 2023, the House voted 311 to 114 to expel him — only the sixth member expelled in House history, and the first to be expelled before a criminal conviction or censure. He became famous for his post-expulsion social media presence, carrying on as a political commentator and personality even as his legal case proceeded.

In August 2024, Santos pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. In April 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months — over seven years — in federal prison. At sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert told him: "Mr. Santos, words have consequences" — the same words that had won him a congressional seat had also landed him in her courtroom. As the sentence was read, Santos covered his face with his hands.

His campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, separately pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge and awaited sentencing.

Currently Serving Members Under Federal Indictment

Neither of the two members described below has been convicted. Both have pleaded not guilty. Both remain in office, voting in the House of Representatives, as of the date this article was written. Their cases represent the live frontier of congressional criminal accountability in 2026.

FEMA Funds, a Diamond Ring, and a Five-Vote Margin

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick won her congressional seat in January 2022 by five votes. Five votes separated her from her opponent in a Democratic primary special election to fill the seat of the late Representative Alcee Hastings. She had run for the same seat twice before and lost both times. The difference in 2021, the year she ran for the third time and finally won, was money. Enormous amounts of it, compared to her prior campaigns.

Where that money came from is now the subject of a federal criminal indictment.

Cherfilus-McCormick and her family ran a healthcare company called Trinity Healthcare Services. In 2021, Trinity was contracted by the Florida Division of Emergency Management to staff COVID-19 vaccination efforts using FEMA funding. That summer, Trinity received a $5 million overpayment — a clerical error by the state agency that sent far more money than the contract specified. According to federal prosecutors, rather than return the overpayment, Cherfilus-McCormick and her brother conspired to convert the $5 million, launder it through a series of accounts to conceal its source, and funnel a substantial portion of it into her congressional campaign — the campaign that ultimately won by five votes.

The indictment, returned by a Miami grand jury in November 2025, charges her with conspiracy to commit theft of government funds, theft of government funds, conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering, conspiracy to make and receive straw donor contributions, making and receiving straw donor contributions, and filing a false tax return. If convicted on all counts, she faces a maximum of 53 years in federal prison.

The details alleged in the indictment and the subsequent House Ethics Committee investigation are specific and damaging. Investigators say the congresswoman and her campaign manager coordinated a straw donor scheme — recruiting friends and family members to donate money that actually originated from the misappropriated FEMA funds, disguising the true source of the campaign contributions. Bank records, investigators said, showed a pattern of funds being transferred into her campaign accounts just before Federal Election Commission filing deadlines, then transferred out again shortly after — a maneuver that would misrepresent her fundraising strength to voters. A diamond ring alleged to have been purchased with the proceeds appeared, investigators noted, in her official congressional portrait.

Cherfilus-McCormick has denied all of the allegations and pleaded not guilty. "I am innocent and I am a fighter," she said in a statement. Her defense has argued that she was entitled to profits from the healthcare business and that the government's characterization of the funds as stolen is inaccurate. She also argued that the concurrent criminal and House Ethics proceedings — both running simultaneously — constitute a denial of due process, since testifying in one arena could compromise her Fifth Amendment rights in the other. The Ethics Committee denied her request to delay its proceedings.

In March 2026, a special bipartisan subcommittee of the House Ethics Committee conducted a rare public trial — only the second such public proceeding since Charlie Rangel's ethics hearing in 2010. After deliberations that lasted until well past midnight, the panel found Cherfilus-McCormick guilty of 25 out of 27 alleged ethics violations, citing "clear and convincing evidence." This is not a criminal conviction — it is an internal House finding — but it represents an extraordinary institutional judgment against a sitting member.

The full House Ethics Committee was scheduled to determine recommended sanctions after the House's spring recess, beginning April 10, 2026. Those sanctions could range from censure to expulsion. Meanwhile, her federal criminal trial is expected to begin in summer 2026.

She remains a sitting member of Congress.

An ICE Facility, a Mayor's Arrest, and Charges of Assault

The case of Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey is categorically different from the corruption and fraud cases that dominate the history of congressional criminality. It does not involve bribery, money laundering, or personal enrichment. It emerged from a confrontation between a sitting member of Congress and federal law enforcement officers during a constitutionally authorized oversight visit — and it has become one of the most politically charged criminal prosecutions of a sitting lawmaker in recent memory.

On May 9, 2025, McIver and several other Democratic House members traveled to Delaney Hall, a federal ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, to conduct oversight — a legitimate and explicitly constitutional function of the legislative branch. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka joined them at the facility. When federal agents ordered Baraka to leave and moved to arrest him for trespassing, McIver and her colleagues intervened. A physical confrontation followed.

The Department of Justice — under Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, who had previously served as Donald Trump's personal defense attorney — charged McIver with three federal counts of assaulting, resisting, impeding, and interfering with federal law enforcement officers. The indictment alleges that McIver "slammed her forearm into the body of one law enforcement officer" and "used each of her forearms to forcibly strike a second officer." Body camera footage from the agents and video from bystanders documented the scuffle, which lasted just over a minute.

McIver has pleaded not guilty and called the charges "a brazen attempt at political intimidation." Her defense attorney, Paul Fishman — himself a former U.S. Attorney for New Jersey — argues that her prosecution is selectively and vindictively pursued because of her political opposition to the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies. He has noted the contrast between her prosecution and the pardons extended to January 6 defendants convicted of physical violence against law enforcement. "She was charged with something she never would've been charged with if she was a Republican," Fishman has said in court filings.

The prosecution has raised a significant constitutional question: the Speech or Debate Clause of Article One shields members of Congress from legal proceedings related to their official legislative activities. McIver's team argued her conduct at the facility — a congressional oversight visit — was shielded by that clause. The district court judge, Jamel K. Semper, largely rejected this argument, finding that the alleged physical conduct during a federal officer's arrest fell outside the protections of legislative immunity. As of early 2026, McIver was appealing that ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and the trial had been delayed pending those appellate proceedings.

The judge also admonished prosecutors over inflammatory statements made by government officials online, noting that DHS posts claiming McIver had "stormed" the facility and linking the incident to "Antifa activity" were prejudicial to the jury pool and inconsistent with the facts alleged in the indictment itself.

If convicted on all three counts, McIver faces up to 17 years in federal prison.

She remains a sitting member of Congress and has continued conducting oversight of immigration enforcement facilities.

The Pardon That Preempted a Trial

Bribery Charges Erased Before Trial

Henry Cuellar of Laredo, Texas, represented one of the most compelling congressional corruption cases of recent years — until it was extinguished by a presidential pardon before it ever reached a jury.

Cuellar was indicted in May 2024 on federal bribery charges alleging he and his wife had set up shell companies to receive $600,000 in payments from Banco Azteca, a Mexican bank, and from Azerbaijan's state-run oil company, in exchange for political favors including killing legislation that ran counter to Azerbaijan's interests and working to influence U.S. policy in ways that benefited the foreign governments. He had served for decades on the House Appropriations Committee's Homeland Security subcommittee, giving him significant influence over border and security funding — making him, prosecutors alleged, a particularly valuable target for foreign recruitment.

Cuellar pleaded not guilty and remained in office throughout 2024. The House Ethics Committee established an investigative subcommittee and reauthorized it into the 119th Congress. His case appeared to be moving toward trial in 2025.

In December 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned Cuellar — a Democrat — before any trial had taken place. No verdict had been rendered. No guilt had been established in court. The pardon wiped the case from the legal record before a jury ever heard it.

The use of a presidential pardon to eliminate a pending criminal case against a sitting member of the opposing party, before trial, has no clear modern precedent. It raises questions that extend beyond the Cuellar case itself: what message does such a pardon send to others who might be tempted to commit similar crimes? And what does it mean for the integrity of prosecutorial deterrence when an executive can dissolve a criminal case with a single signature?

The House Ethics Committee's investigation of Cuellar remains technically unresolved as of April 2026, though the criminal charges have been extinguished.

Why This Keeps Happening — The Architecture of Non-Accountability

Understanding why members of Congress continue to face criminal charges — and why so few face meaningful consequences while still in office — requires understanding the structural features that make Congress uniquely difficult to hold accountable.

The Constitution provides no automatic removal mechanism. A criminal conviction for any crime, including a felony, does not automatically remove a member of Congress from office. The only constitutional path to removal is expulsion by a two-thirds vote of the member's chamber — a threshold so high that it has been cleared only a handful of times in American history. Under House Rules, a member convicted of a felony carrying a sentence of two or more years is instructed not to vote, but this is a rule, not a law, and the member continues to draw a salary and retain their seat until expelled, resigned, or defeated.

Party loyalty suppresses accountability. The Menendez case demonstrated this vividly. Senate Democrats largely refused to take meaningful action against him for months after his indictment, citing due process concerns that they had not applied as rigorously when Republicans faced similar circumstances. The Santos expulsion moved quickly in part because Republicans had little to lose from removing a member in a district likely to remain competitive — and in part because the bipartisan evidence against him was so overwhelming that inaction became politically untenable. In cases where a member's seat is safe and their party needs the vote, expulsion proceedings rarely materialize.

The pardon power has no congressional analog. The executive branch can commute or pardon federal criminal convictions — including those of sitting members, as Trump did with Cuellar, Collins, and Hunter. Congress has no equivalent power to undo a pardon. The result is that the deterrent effect of federal prosecution can be selectively eliminated by a president whose political interests may align with those of the defendant.

Investigations are slow and trials are slower. The typical federal investigation-to-indictment-to-trial timeline runs years. A member can be investigated, indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced, and begin appeals — all while continuing to cast votes, represent constituents, and collect congressional salaries. Cherfilus-McCormick's alleged crimes date to 2021; her trial is not expected until summer 2026. McIver's charges stem from an incident in May 2025 and her trial remains delayed by appeals. During all of this time, both women continue to serve.

Indictment is not conviction. This article is careful to maintain that distinction, and readers should too. McIver and Cherfilus-McCormick are presumed innocent. The legal proceedings against them have not concluded. The history of congressional criminal cases includes multiple examples of members indicted on serious charges who were ultimately acquitted, had their convictions overturned, or had charges dropped due to prosecutorial error (as in the Ted Stevens case, where a wrongful conviction was vacated). The system, when it works, applies the presumption of innocence. This article does the same.

What the system does not do — what it has never done — is create automatic, swift accountability for members credibly accused of serious crimes. Between indictment and verdict, the defendant votes. Between conviction and expulsion, the member draws a paycheck. And after a pardon, the entire legal record disappears.

The Pipeline Remains Open

The question "are there currently any convicted criminals serving in Congress?" has, as of April 2026, a technically reassuring answer: no. Both Menendez and Santos are gone. No sitting member carries a standing criminal conviction.

But this is a snapshot of a moment, not a description of a trend. The pipeline of potential future convictions among current members is real and active. Cherfilus-McCormick faces a federal trial this summer on charges carrying 53 years of potential prison time, after being found guilty of 25 ethics violations by a bipartisan House panel. McIver faces trial on assault charges that her own judge has ruled can proceed, with up to 17 years of potential imprisonment at stake. And the Cuellar case — while legally extinguished by pardon — was never resolved on the merits; the underlying allegations were never tested before a jury.

The pattern that emerges from this history is consistent: congressional criminality is not primarily a problem of ideology, party, region, or era. It is a structural problem — one rooted in the concentration of governmental power without commensurate accountability mechanisms, in the slow pace of legal proceedings against powerful defendants, in the availability of political pressure as a substitute for legal deterrence, and in the pardon power as an escape hatch for favored defendants.

The courts have repeatedly proven willing to prosecute, try, and convict members of Congress. Whether Congress, as an institution, is willing to enforce meaningful consequences before those court proceedings conclude — and whether the political conditions that allow convicted or accused members to remain in office will ever change — are questions that each Congress answers anew.

The 119th Congress's answer, so far, is familiar: wait and see.

This article is based on court records, Department of Justice press releases, House Ethics Committee reports, congressional records, and verified journalism from multiple news organizations. All criminal charges described as pending represent allegations only; the accused members have pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent. Cases are current as of April 4, 2026.