On Saturday afternoon, JD Vance seemed predictably eager to defend Donald Trump’s decision to launch an offensive in Venezuela and capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In fact, the vice president specifically emphasized the fact that Maduro was formally charged by U.S. prosecutors with drug trafficking.
“You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States,” Vance wrote via social media, “because you live in a palace in Caracas.”
Perhaps not — although apparently you do get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States if you’re a foreign head of state with ties to members of Trump’s inner circle. As The New York Times summarized:
Two Latin American strongmen were charged in Manhattan with corrupting their governments, using state power to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.
One, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was abruptly pardoned by President Trump last month. The other, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, was captured on Saturday in a military raid.
The White House and its allies justified the operation to bomb Venezuela and seize Maduro in large part because of the federal drug-trafficking indictment against the South American leader. This isn’t an altogether persuasive pitch, especially given Trump’s emphasis on Venezuela’s oil, but over the weekend it was nevertheless one of the administration’s principal talking points.
It’s not as if the U.S. can just remain indifferent when the head of a Latin American country is accused of drug trafficking, right?
That might be easier to take seriously if Trump hadn’t just pardoned the head of a Latin American country who was convicted of drug trafficking.
Trump, despite all of his “tough on crime” chest-thumping, thought it’d be a good idea to pardon a notorious drug trafficker, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Even by 2025 standards, the developments were breathtaking: As a separate New York Times analysis summarized, Hernández “orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy” that benefited drug cartels, even as Honduras grew poorer, more violent and more corrupt.
Hernández also 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, all while trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Trump, however, freed him anyway, thanks in part to his political connections to political operatives such as Roger Stone.
On Nov. 30, Trump tried to defend his pardon, telling reporters, “If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.”
Four weeks later, he took a foreign president into custody and took steps to put him behind bars for the rest of his life.
With this in mind, a reporter asked the American president a good question on Saturday morning: Would Trump consider pardoning Maduro? The Republican didn’t answer the question directly, though he clung to his baseless idea that the Biden administration had been too mean to the convicted drug trafficker. A day later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and encouraged people to read the indictment against Maduro, which documented the extent to which the Venezuelan leader “used the levers of [his country’s] security apparatus not to arrest drug traffickers, but to cooperate and facilitate the trafficking of drugs for the purpose of getting them into the United States.” Host Kristen Welker reminded her guest, “And yet, Mr. Secretary, a month ago President Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras who was just starting a 45-year sentence for trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine. Does that not undercut the administration’s stated goal as you just said to go after these narco-terrorists?” Rubio eventually responded, “I don’t do the pardon file. I’m not against it or for it. I just didn’t review the file. So I can’t speak to you about the dynamics that led the president to make the decision that he made.” Or put another way, he couldn’t think of a credible defense for the indefensible, so he dodged the question. As the case against Maduro advances, however, it’s a safe bet that the question will linger for quite a while.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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