When Donald Trump announced the day after Thanksgiving that he intended to pardon former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández, part of me wondered if it might be a trial balloon. Maybe, I thought, the Republican president would float this as a possibility and back down soon after in the face of widespread outrage.
As ridiculous as American politics has become, it seemed implausible that Trump would free a notorious foreign drug trafficker, even as his administration claims to be engaged in a literal armed conflict against foreign drug traffickers.
The president, however, was apparently sincere about his intentions. The Associated Press reported:
Former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández … was released from prison following a pardon from President Donald Trump, officials confirmed Tuesday.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate website showed that Hernández was released from U.S. Penitentiary, Hazelton in West Virginia on Monday, and a spokesperson for the bureau on Tuesday confirmed his release.
Hernández was convicted last year in a sweeping drug-trafficking case and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The outcome of his criminal trial was not exactly surprising. As The New York Times summarized, Hernández “boasted that he would ‘stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’” and accepted a $1 million bribe to allow cocaine shipments to pass through his country.
What’s more, the same Times report noted that Hernández “orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy” that benefited drug cartels, even as Honduras grew poorer, more violent and more corrupt.
Trump, however, freed him anyway — to the great surprise of both Hondurans and U.S. officials who had invested enormous resources in building a successful case against the former leader.
Pressed for some kind of explanation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president was responding to “the people of Honduras,” who convinced Trump that the Biden-era Justice Department was being too hard on the notorious drug trafficker.
For his part, Trump said late last week that he was taking this step on the advice of “people that I greatly respect.” He didn’t identify any of these people, but longtime Republican operative Roger Stone — a Trump confidant and himself the recipient of a scandalous pardon — claimed that the president made the announcement just “three hours after” he sent Trump a letter from Hernández.
While it’s difficult to say whether (and to what degree) Stone was peddling self-aggrandizing claims, The Wall Street Journal reported that Stone has been railing against Hernández’s conviction for months. The GOP operative also has hosted Hernández’s family members on his radio program, and he has argued online that a Hernández pardon would undermine Honduras’ departing leftist government.
After the pardon news was formally announced, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered floor remarks in which the New York Democrat described the president’s move as “truly disgusting and alarming.”
“Pardoning one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers is egregious, shameful and dangerous, even for Donald Trump,” Schumer said. The senator also drew attention to an Axios report that quoted a Trump adviser who conceded, “How we justify this is really hard.”
“Trump’s pardon reeks of hypocrisy, it reeks of corruption, which is the M.O. of the Trump administration,” Schumer concluded.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
