Donald Trump used to borrow money from banks. Now he’s out of the bank game altogether. His money is in the cloud of crypto so nobody can count it, nobody can see it, nobody can trace it.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
News outlets are reporting this morning that former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández has been released from a federal prison in West Virginia after Donald Trump gave him a “full and complete pardon.” Hernández was serving 45 years in prison after having been convicted last year of running a “narco-state” by using payoffs from drug cartels to support his political career in Honduras. Evidence in his trial proved that he had facilitated the movement of 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras on its way to drug gangs in the United States.
Hernández’s wife Ana García thanked Trump for the pardon in a post this morning on X: “Today we give thanks to God, because He is just and His timing is perfect. Thank you, Mr. President, for restoring our hope and for recognizing a truth that we always knew,” she wrote.
We have not seen any evidence that Hernández or people close to him paid a sum of money to Trump to secure his pardon, but with Trump’s moves against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom he accuses of running Venezuela as a “narco-state,” what other conclusion can you draw? During the eight years Hernández served in office between 2014 and 2022, politicians from both American political parties, including Joe Biden, praised him for cooperating with the U.S. in fighting drug trafficking. Trump in 2019 praised him for “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.” 2019 was the same year that the Honduran president’s brother, Tony Hernández, was convicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to a term of life in prison.
Just between us, there had to have been evidence that he moved one hell of a lot of drugs to get a life sentence. The conviction of the brother of the president of Honduras for drug trafficking shows without a doubt that the Department of Justice had a great deal of knowledge of how drug trafficking worked in Honduras, especially since President Hernández himself was named in the case as an unindicted co-conspirator of his brother.
The president overseeing the DOJ at the time of the conviction of Tony Hernández was Donald J. Trump. It is likely that the DOJ began its investigation of the Honduran President at the time of his brother’s conviction and sentencing. That means it was Trump’s DOJ in 2019 and 2020 that began treating Hernández “very harshly and unfairly,” as Trump has described his prosecution.
An American jury found Hernández guilty of trafficking hundreds of tons of drugs into this country. Prosecutors produced evidence at trial that he had protected drug lords in Honduras and prevented their prosecution in that country in order to facilitate their trafficking business. All of this at the same time he was being celebrated by U.S. political figures as an “ally” of this country in fighting drugs.
Trump’s pardon of such a man makes absolutely no sense unless Hernández arranged for Trump to be paid off.
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Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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