“Honduran Drug Kingpin and Former President Walks Free After Trump Pardon”, National Review
December 2, 2025
President Trump has followed through with his pardon of major narcotics felon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who flooded the United States with 400 tons of cocaine. It is a shocking abuse of power. Trump is currently (and lawlessly) using the trafficking of comparatively negligible amounts of cocaine as a pretext to fire missiles at vessels on the high seas off South and Central America, killing 83 people so far.
I won’t belabor the record with my contentions that the presidential pardon power is an anachronistic catalyst of corruption that should long ago have been repealed. (See, e.g., here, here, here, and here.) I will, however, state the obvious: If, as seems increasingly likely, the Democrats retake control of the House in next year’s midterm elections, the president’s gross abuse of clemency authority will be an impeachment headliner. I doubt that the Republicans’ only plausible defense — “Democrats did it too” — will resonate much.
The New York Times reports that the president issued a full pardon for Hernández on Monday night. This morning, Hernández left a federal prison in West Virginia, where he had been serving his richly deserved 45-year prison sentence.
Trump’s spin that Hernández had been “set up” by the Biden administration is as laughable as it is appalling. While the case went to court during Biden’s administration, it was aggressively investigated by the Justice Department in Trump’s first term. And Trump’s claim that Biden’s prosecutors “basically said that [Hernández] was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country” is just astonishing.
Here is how federal prosecutors in Manhattan summarized the proof that persuaded a jury to convict Hernández:
According to court documents, from at least in or about 2004, up to and including in or about 2022, Hernández, the former two-term president of Honduras and former president of the Honduran National Congress, was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world. During his political career, Hernández abused his powerful positions and authority in Honduras to facilitate the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Hernández’s co-conspirators were armed with machine guns and destructive devices, including AK-47s, AR-15s, and grenade launchers, which they used to protect their massive cocaine loads as they transited across Honduras on their way to the United States, protect the money they made from the eventual sale of this cocaine, and guard their drug-trafficking territory from rivals. Hernández received millions of dollars of drug money from some of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, and used those bribes to fuel his rise in Honduran politics. In turn, as Hernández rose to power in Honduras, 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.
It is notable that in 2020, moreover, Trump’s Justice Department charged Nicolás Maduro for doing, as president and then dictator of Venezuela, exactly what Hernández did — in the words of the indictment, conspiracy to “‘flood’ the United States with cocaine and inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in this country,” for the purpose of “using cocaine as a weapon against America.”
In fact, the indictment elaborates that it was part of Maduro’s conspiracy to “coordinate foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug trafficking”; to use Honduras as a “transshipment point”; and to create an “air bridge” for cocaine-packed flights between Venezuela and Honduras.
These allegations are an essential part of the Trump administration’s deployment of an American armada to conduct serial drone attacks on small boats. They are an essential part of why (as our editorial today explains) the president himself is weighing whether to start a war with Venezuela over the regime’s “narco-terrorism.”
And yet, Maduro’s Honduran partner in crime, Hernández, walks free. A disgrace.
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy