Unfortunately, this is what you get when voters decide it’s a good idea to put a convicted felon into the presidency of the US. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the bottom of the debauchery yet.
This would be comical if it wasn’t coming from our executive branch.
Q: “POTUS said it was his intention to pardon the former President of Honduras who was a convicted drug trafficker…POTUS said ‘If someone sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.’ How is that different than what the administration is accusing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro of?”
Leavitt: “The former-President Hernandez was set up. This was a clear Biden over-prosecution…His conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who ‘struck a deal with the Biden-Harris administration.’”
BTW the example of a ware crime that the DoD manual uses as an example is, survivors of an attack on a ship floating in the wreckage, saying to kill them would certainly be a war crime.
POLITICO: You pardoned the former president of Honduras even though he was convicted in a massive international drug trafficking scheme. How is that 0 tolerance on drug trafficking?
TRUMP: Well I don’t know him and I know very little about him other than people said it was like an Obama-Biden type set up where he was set up.
“I don’t know him, I know nothing about, him, his trial, his sentence, the evidence, the vast amount of work our people put in building evidence and a case against him. But some people said something. He was a president like me.”
Donald not only pardoned the foreign agent/president who violently trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine to the American people, he removed the ICE detainer on him and then had taxpayer paid prison officials drive him and set him up at the Waldorf Astoria in NYC.
Amid Mass ICE Arrests, Trump Pardon Recipient Juan Orlando Hernández Given Special Treatment
After the former Honduran president was pardoned, ICE dropped its detainer on him, and he was whisked away to a luxury hotel in New York City.
But when it comes to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was tried and convicted in the U.S. in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison for taking bribes and allowing traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., Trump has taken a decidedly softer tone.
Hernández, he said, has been “treated very harshly and unfairly” — so unfairly that on Dec. 1, Trump pardoned the former president after he served less than four of those 45 years.
But the federal government’s magnanimity did not end there. On the day he was to be released, records show, Hernández had an immigration detainer — a request for law enforcement agencies to hold noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in place.
Here, too, the Trump’s administration’s treatment of Hernández differed from its public objectives. Other noncitizens caught up in recent immigration sweeps — the vast majority of whom do not have criminal records — have faced swift efforts to deport them, even to countries where they may face threats. But in Hernández’s case, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to get his detainer removed so he could walk free.
And Hernández did not just walk out of the prison. Despite persistent budget and staffing shortages, prison officials paid a specialized tactical team overtime to drive Hernández from a high-security facility in West Virginia to the famed five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, according to records and three people familiar with the situation. Before he left, Hernández was allowed to use the captain’s government phone to talk to the federal prison system’s deputy director, Joshua Smith, who was convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy before Trump pardoned him in 2021.