When asked about his pardon of the major drug kingpin of Honduras, former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in US courts and sentenced to 45 years for bringing COCAINE into the US, the senile demented old geezer Trump, who is always asleep during cabinet meetings, said: "WHO? I DON'T KNOW THE GUY. I WAS TOLD HE WAS TREATED UNFAIRLY...MANY OF THE PEOPLE IN HONDURAS TOLD ME TO PARDON HIM...THEY SAID HE WAS A DRUG DEALER...[WHOSE CONVICTION WAS] A BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SETUP".
"I WAS TOLD...., THEY SAID... " reveals that Trump is not in the driver's seat in the White House and makes decisions based on what he is told by the malevolent Rasputins who surround him like the Fascist Stephen Miller and others. Alternatively, given his genetic obssession with making money by any means possible, Trump might actually be selling pardons: He issues them in exchange for some reward, which could be money. This is the same sort of extortion and blackmail he has imposed on banks, universities, and other institutions: You won't get harassed if you just pay up!
The fact that Trump is issuing pardons like Henry Ford was making cars - assembly lines - means that he has no idea what he's doing. Seems to me that this is by far more corrupt than signing with an autopen.
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Cocaine, Bribes And Murder: Inside The Accusations Against The Drug Lord Trump Just Pardoned
President Donald Trump ― who has used crime and the flow of narcotics into the United States to justify a brutal immigration crackdown, oversee possible war crimes and threaten military action in Venezuela ― just pardoned the former Honduran president who was sentenced to decades in prison for swamping the United States with hundreds of tons of cocaine.
Trump claimed days ago that “many of the people of Honduras” asked him to pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who has maintained his innocence.
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them,” Trump told reporters over the weekend.
The crimes Hernández was convicted on involve the exact type of activity Trump says must be eradicated. Here’s what you should know about them.
Flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine
Last year, a U.S. court sentenced
Hernández to 45 years in prison for his role in flooding the country
with more than 400 tons of cocaine, an amount equal to more than 4.5
billion individual doses of the drug. The Justice Department described
him as being at “the center of one of the largest and most violent
drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Donald Trump and Juan Orlando Hernández. Getty
Supporting the trafficking meant enabling horrifying brutalities. As he rose to power in Honduras, the DOJ said, “He provided increased support and protection for his co-conspirators, allowing them to move mountains of cocaine, commit acts of violence and murder, and help turn Honduras into one of the most dangerous countries in the world.”
Hernández, who served two terms as president, did all this while publicly promoting legislation to crack down on cartels in Honduras, prosecutors said.
A $1 million bribe from ‘El Chapo’
When Hernández’s younger brother was in court, prosecutors presented evidence that his president brother accepted a $1 million bribe from the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán during his first campaign for the presidency. That bribe, like many others he’s accused of accepting, was intended to protect drug passages into the U.S.
When Hernández stood trial, other drug traffickers testified about bribing him with more massive sums going back over a decade ago. Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, a one-time Honduran gang leader who’s confessed to playing a role in 78 deaths, testified that in 2012, he handed over $250,000 to Hernández, then-president of Honduras’ National Congress, in exchange for not being arrested and extradited to the U.S.
Juan Orlando Hernández on the campaign trail in 2013. ORLANDO SIERRA via Getty Images
An accountant for Hernández also testified he’d seen the former president receive briefcases stuffed with thousands in bribe money, saying he was responsible for counting out the wads of $20 bills.
‘We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’
According to more testimony from the accountant, Hernández was callous and unapologetic when talking about the drug trafficking prosecutors say he enabled.
“We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it,” the former president once said, the accountant recalled in court.
Prosecutors also presented evidence that Hernández once told a cocaine trafficker he would be safe from punishment in the U.S., because “by the time the gringos find out, we will have eliminated extradition,” he allegedly said.
And as a result of bribes paid to Hernández, prosecutors claimed, drug traffickers received information about U.S. efforts to train Honduran Air Force pilots to conduct anti-narcotics operations.
A courtroom sketch from when Juan Orlando Hernández sat trial in 2022. via Associated Press
A violent death by machete
The DOJ said in 2022 that during Hernández’s brother’s trial for drug trafficking, prosecutors introduced into evidence ledgers belonging to a Honduran drug trafficker with “JOH” ― Hernández’s initials ― corresponding to large payments.
A week after his brother was convicted, that drug trafficker was murdered in prison by inmates armed with machetes and a gun to prevent his “potential cooperation” with law enforcement against Hernández, prosecutors say.
Manipulating elections with drug money
The DOJ’s 2022 indictment of Hernández accused him of using money from drug trafficking to manipulate election results when he was running for president.
Prosecutors presented evidence that during the 2013 election, Hernández directed a drug trafficker to travel to areas where he had little electoral support and bribe local officials to skew the vote in his favor. He did the same thing in the 2017 election, prosecutors said.
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