He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.
At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.
Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.
[…]
But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate.
I am including a gift link for you to read the whole sordid story. This man is a monster. One of the worst ever. And Trump pardoned him.
That may seem counterintuitive since he’s simultaneously waging war on Venezuela over cocaine trafficking but he’s acting entirely on impulse now and Roger Stone told him that he was “unfairly” prosecuted so Trump did it. He rightly sees himself in Hernandez — a corrupt criminal president:
For many Hondurans, his conviction was a rare taste of justice. A woman in a crowd outside the courthouse celebrating his punishment had held a sign that read “No clemency for narcopolitics.”
But on Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times that “many friends” had asked him to pardon Mr. Hernández: “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.”
No doubt that is the argument Roger made to him.
Trump 2.0 has been a train wreck from the beginning but it does feel like he’s just saying “fuck it” now and doing what he feels like doing no matter how insane it might be. We are entering a new phase of lunacy.
Although Republicans have expressed just a tiny bit of “concern” over Pete Hegseth’s order to “kill ’em all” in the Caribbean, I haven’t heard any of them speak out about this. I honestly don’t think there’s any red line for them. If Trump decided to set up camps to throw all of his political enemies in them I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t get any trouble from the GOP.