source: NewYorkTimes
President Trump formally pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras on Monday evening, fulfilling a vow he had made days before to free an ex-president who was at the center of what the authorities had characterized as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Mr. Trump pledged to issue the pardon last week, after Mr. Hernández sent him a four-page letter casting himself as a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden-Harris administration and comparing his fate to that of the American president.
Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime on-and-off political adviser, said on his radio show that he had sent the letter, which was dated Oct. 28, to Mr. Trump hours before the president announced his plan to pardon Mr. Hernández. When asked whether he had been compensated for his role, Mr. Stone said he was not.
A White House official said Mr. Trump had not seen the letter before his announcement on Friday about the pardon. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying the administration by matter of routine did not discuss pardons on the record.
Mr. Trump discussed the planned pardon with reporters over the weekend in terms similar to those Mr. Hernández had used in his letter, saying that “the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing.”
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Mr. Trump said. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.
Mr. Hernández’s lawyer said on Tuesday that his client had been released from a federal prison in West Virginia. The White House confirmed the pardon had been issued.
Mr. Trump defended the pardon when asked about it Tuesday by a reporter.
“That was a Biden — horrible witch hunt which was, you know, a lot of people in Honduras asked me to do that and I did it,” he said. “I feel very good about it. If you have some drug dealers in your country and you’re the president, you don’t necessarily put the president in jail for 45 years.”
The pardon had caused an uproar before it was carried out, given the serious narcotics crimes of which Mr. Hernández was convicted and Mr. Trump’s stated ambition of curbing the flow of drugs into the United States, and, in particular, his monthslong push against Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader.
The Trump administration has engaged in a highly controversial and potentially illegal practice of bombing boats in the waters around Venezuela that officials insist are piloted by drug traffickers bringing their wares into the United States. In fact, a separate social media post from the one that promised a pardon for Mr. Hernández argued, shortly before elections in Honduras, that the next president should not give Mr. Maduro greater regional control.
Mr. Hernández’s letter contained all the ingredients that, over time, foreign leaders, lobbyists and others who interact with Mr. Trump have found effective: flattery, a sense of shared persecution and an appeal to Mr. Trump’s perception of himself as the final arbiter of justice.
Addressing Mr. Trump as “your Excellency,” Mr. Hernández, who last year was sentenced to 45 years in prison for flooding the United States with cocaine, wrote, “I have found strength from you, Sir.”
“Your resilience to get back in that great office notwithstanding the persecution and prosecution you faced, all for what, because you wished to make your country Great Again,” Mr. Hernández wrote. “What you accomplished is unprecedented and truly historic.”
Mr. Hernández was convicted last year, but the investigation that led to his imprisonment began years earlier, before Mr. Trump was elected the first time. Investigators with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Manhattan federal prosecutors worked their way up a chain of cooperators involved in what they said — and multiple juries agreed — was a conspiracy to traffic enormous amounts of cocaine through Honduras and into the United States.
In his letter, though, Mr. Hernández characterized the case as a fly-by-night affair run by unscrupulous prosecutors in an office Mr. Trump has long resented — the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York — and directed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris. The description was reminiscent of how Mr. Trump often refers to the four separate criminal cases against him.
“The politicization and selective application of justice in my case is undeniable,” Mr. Hernández wrote in his letter, adding, “I was prosecuted without solid evidence, based on the testimonies of violent traffickers and professional liars motivated by revenge and by get-out-of-jail deals.”
He also worked to remind Mr. Trump of their personal relationship, reminiscing about remarks Mr. Trump had made at the 2018 Israeli American Council National Summit, in which he had spoken about halting the flow of drug trafficking at the Southern border.
“We’re winning after years and years of losing,” Mr. Trump said then. “We’re stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”
Mr. Hernández, reflecting on the remarks from prison, informed the president that “those words meant a great deal to me, my family and the Honduran people.”
The pardon of Mr. Hernández is a stark contrast to his administration’s treatment of his co-conspirator, who has been credited with helping to secure the former Honduran president’s conviction.
The co-conspirator, Amilcar Alexander Ardon Soriano, testified at Mr. Hernández’s trial that he had served as the mayor of the municipality of El Paraíso while running drugs, participated in torture and murdered two people, and that he was responsible for the deaths of more than 50 others.
Mr. Ardon said he had asked lawmakers whom he had bribed to vote for Mr. Hernández as the president of the Honduran Congress. In return, Mr. Ardon said, Mr. Hernández promised to protect him from prosecutors.
Mr. Ardon was sentenced in January to time served. But he was immediately taken to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. His lawyer, Jeffrey Cohn, petitioned ICE and the Justice Department to defer Mr. Ardon’s deportation, arguing that his life would be at risk if he were sent to Honduras.
“Typically, a cooperator like that will be protected from deportation because the threats of violence and reprisal against him for that kind of cooperation are self-evident,” Mr. Cohn said in an interview on Monday.
Mr. Ardon was deported in April. He was immediately taken into custody by the Honduran authorities, charged with crimes related to the accusations brought in the United States. He is in prison in Honduras awaiting trial.
“If I were Alex, and I were sitting in a Honduran jail, the last thing I would want to hear is Juan Orlando is coming home when I was the one who put him in jail for 45 years,” Mr. Cohn said.
Mr. Trump issued more than 200 pardons and commutations in his first term, most of them at the very end of his term. Mr. Biden far eclipsed that number, and Mr. Trump is on pace for a similar statistic. So far, he has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations, most of them to people arrested in connection with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Stone received a pardon from Mr. Trump in the final full day of the president’s first term. Mr. Stone was among a small group of people who had been charged and convicted with crimes in connection to the special counsel’s investigation into possible ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Stone maintained his innocence, and Mr. Tump and his allies have viewed that investigation as illegitimate for nearly a decade.
