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When President Donald Trump Former President of Honduras Juan Orlando emerged Hernandez was serving a 45-year prison sentence, his most senior, after being convicted of conspiring to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. white House The associate was among the last to be informed.
according to Wall Street Journal, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wills And other top advisers were given no advance notice of his decision to issue a “full and complete pardon” to Hernandez, whom a witness at his trial claimed planned to “stuff drugs up the noses of gringos.”
At the time, Trump claimed the former head of Honduras had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” since his trial took place during the Biden administration — even though the investigation into his conduct was at one point led by senior federal prosecutor Emile Bove, who later served as one of Trump’s personal lawyers before Trump brought him to the Justice Department as a top official and later nominated him for a lifetime appointment as a federal appellate judge.
Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone lobbied the President to pardon the convicted drug smuggler, but he also magazine He was stunned by the speed with which Trump released the notorious criminal from prison and commuted his sentence.
Despite the overwhelming evidence against Hernández, the president absurdly claimed that he had been told by “many people from Honduras” that the former politician’s prosecution was a “Biden setup.”
“He was the president of the country. And he basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” he said.
The president later admitted to knowing “very little” about the case and suggested that the pardon was issued on the orders of political allies who wanted to ensure that a right-wing, Trump-aligned candidate would win the recent presidential election in Honduras.
“Well, I don’t know him, and I know very little about him, except that people said it was like an Obama, Biden-type arrangement,” he said. “There are a lot of people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know, and they feel like they were treated very badly, and they asked me to do it, and I said, I’ll do it.”
Since returning to power in January, Trump has enjoyed his use of a presidential pardon, one of the few presidential authorities that cannot be reviewed by the courts or any other branch of government — a power whose scope is almost monarchical because the framers of the US Constitution adapted it from the royal prerogative of mercy granted to British kings and queens.
The day he took office last January, he issued pardons to nearly all of his supporters who had been convicted of crimes — including violent crimes — that had been committed during the riot at the U.S. Capitol four years earlier in a last-ditch effort to stop the certification of his 2020 election loss. Joe Biden,
Since then, he has consistently used that power to acquit the rich and well-connected of serious crimes, often after being pushed by lobbyists, friends, associates or family members.
In October, he issued a pardon Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, A business associate of his son Donald Trump Jr., who pleaded guilty to failing to prevent the use of a cryptocurrency exchange set up by money launderers, including drug dealers and terrorists.
He has also pardoned several Republican politicians who were accused or convicted of public corruption crimes, each time he falsely alleged that they were improperly targeted for political reasons.
Trump has also granted pardons to a few select Democrats, including former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (after having his prison sentence commuted to five years at the end of his first term) and Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar.
They alleged that Cuellar, who faces trial on charges of accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign governments, was unfairly targeted because he spoke out against the Biden administration’s lax border policies.
After Cuellar filed for re-election as a Democrat, the President criticized him on social media.
“Such a lack of loyalty,” Trump wrote. “Oh’ ok, next time, no Mr. Nice Guy!”