Photo by Jeremy Bishop, Unsplash
Photo by Jeremy Bishop, Unsplash
The only way any of these pardons makes sense is if Donald Trump was paid off to set these drug dealers and murderers free. This isn’t hypocrisy. It is terrorism committed against the American people and our system of laws.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
It’s gotten really hard to say what the worst thing is about Donald Trump, but right up there near the top has to be the machine-gun rapidity of his criminality. How do you keep up with it? Every day, the major news websites are ablaze with new fires lit by Trump. The outrageous way his ICE agents are arresting immigrants without due process and jailing them without formal charges has become so routine, its illegality has been all but ignored. The same was true about the missile attacks on so-called “drug boats” off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America. It took the so-called “double tap” that killed two survivors of a recent attack off the east coast of Venezuela for the question to be raised, what about the other men on the boat who were killed by the first missile? Where is the evidence that the 11 human beings who were killed were involved in the shipment of drugs?
See what I mean? It’s easy to lose track, there is so much shit flowing out of Trump’s White House down such a steep hill every day. Sometimes it takes a while for the outrage to set in.
Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez finally raised a question that should have been a screaming headline for the last 10 months at least. What the hell is Trump doing pardoning so many drug dealers?
Hernandez isn’t even the worst example of a Trump pardon for a major drug dealer. On January 20, before he had even lain his head down on his pillow for the first time of his second term in the White House, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, founder of the online marketplace Silk Road, who was serving a life sentence in federal prison on seven counts of money laundering, narcotics trafficking and conspiracy for facilitating a massive drug business conducted in Bitcoin. The amount of drugs involved in the sales facilitated by Ulbricht’s criminal enterprise was so large, the judge tacked an extra ten years on the double-life sentence.
The FBI also discovered that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 to have someone killed. The murder had not taken place by the time of his arrest, so the prosecutors dropped the charges after Ulbricht was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the drug conspiracy charges.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
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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