Former Texas GOP Rep. Steve Stockman launched his reelection campaign on Monday, promising to fight against lawfare in government, seven years after he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $1 million in restitution.
Stockman was convicted of 23 felonies in 2018 for misusing $1.25 million in funds from political donors meant for charity for personal expenses. But in 2020, President Donald Trump commuted the remaining time left on Stockman’s prison sentence, after he had served more than two years.
Now, the former congressman is deriding his case as another case of “historic and unprecedented political persecution” from Democrats, particularly former President Barack Obama, akin to Trump’s legal problems in 2024 while Joe Biden was president.
“In historic and unprecedented political persecution, as a sitting congressman, I became the venomous target of President Obama and his extremist henchmen,” Stockman said in announcing his reelection bid. “Radical government lawyers spent millions of taxpayer dollars, four years, and convened four grand juries to execute their hatred.”
“I was clearly a leading roadblock to their agenda,” he added. “I will never shirk my solemn duty to freedom and this great nation. Their attack on me inadvertently exposed their own profound corruption. To let them silence me would be a betrayal of my fundamental obligation. I am therefore unreservedly declaring my reelection to the United States Congress.”
He will run to represent Texas’s 9th Congressional District, which comprises part of the Houston area, after Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map to make five seats more favorable for the GOP.
Stockman won two nonconsecutive terms in the House, the first in 1994 and the second in 2012, before losing a 2014 Senate primary bid to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).
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In his campaign launch, Stockman also touted his past support of gun rights, constitutional rights, and anti-abortion rights while in Congress before claiming that he was an abashed “Rebel with a Cause.”
“They call me a rebel,” he said. “If defending the Constitution and the personal liberty of every American citizen makes me a rebel — then I am a Rebel with a Cause.”