President Donald Trump said the 2024 conviction of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez should be pointed to as a “Biden setup.”
Trump announced last Friday that he would pardon Hernandez because he’s been “treated very harshly and unfairly.” The former Honduran head was convicted of helping drug traffickers move hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
“Well, I was told — I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,” Trump told reporters Sunday. “He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
Federal prosecutors accused Hernandez in 2019, during Trump’s first term, of using drug money to fund his 2013 presidential bid. The Biden administration extradited him to face trial in 2022 after he left office. His trial did not start until last year, when a prosecutor revealed that he told drug dealers that “together they were going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said after Hernandez‘s sentencing that the former Honduran president, who served his people from 2013 to 2022, “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams also accused Hernandez of moving “well over approximately 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.”
Trump said he heard the people of Honduras believed he was “set up.”
“He was the president of the country, and 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 that,” he said.
When asked what evidence he had to support the alleged setup, he said: “They could say that you take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life. That includes this country.”
The pardon stunned Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
“He was the leader of one of the largest criminal enterprises that has ever been subject to a conviction in U.S. courts, and less than one year into his sentence, President Trump is pardoning him, suggesting that President Trump cares nothing about narcotrafficking,” Kaine said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Trump announced Hernandez‘s pardon alongside his support of Honduran conservative presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura. Hondurans are voting in their presidential general election, and early results have favored Asfura, who is facing off against former Honduran Vice President Salvador Nasralla.
The president suggested he would be dissuaded from sending money to Honduras if Nasralla wins.
“If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is,” Trump wrote.
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Trump’s support of the former Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking comes as his administration has taken a harsh stance on the drug problem. The president recently expressed support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as he has been accused of carrying out an extra strike on two drug traffickers who were shipwrecked in September.
The War Department has killed at least 83 people in 21 strikes on alleged drug boats since September.