The president formally granted a pardon to former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras on Monday night (2), fulfilling the task of freeing a former president who was at the center of what authorities characterized as “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Trump’s promise to pardon Hernández last week came hours after he received a flattering letter in which Hernández presented himself as a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden-Harris administration, comparing his fate to that of the US president.
The four-page letter was dated October 28. But it was delivered to Trump by Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime on-and-off political adviser, just hours before the pardon plan was announced, Stone said on his radio show Sunday.
Continues after advertising
A White House official said Trump had not seen the letter before posting on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday about the impending grant of clemency. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying the administration does not routinely discuss pardons officially.
Hernández’s attorney said Tuesday that his client had been released from a federal prison in West Virginia. The White House confirmed that the pardon had been issued.
The promised pardon caused great controversy before it went into effect, given the serious narcotics crimes for which Hernández was convicted and Trump’s stated ambition to stem the flow of drugs into the United States, especially his months-long campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
The Trump administration has engaged in a highly controversial and potentially illegal practice of bombing boats in the waters around Venezuela, which authorities say are piloted by drug traffickers bringing their wares into the US. In fact, a separate social media post, different from the one promising Hernández a pardon, argued just before elections in Honduras that the next president should not give Maduro greater regional control.
Hernández’s letter contained all the ingredients that, over time, foreign leaders, lobbyists and others who interact with Trump have found effective: sycophancy, a sense of shared persecution and an appeal to Trump’s perception of himself as the final arbiter of justice.
Addressing Trump as “Your Excellency,” Hernández, who last year was sentenced to 45 years in prison for flooding the United States with cocaine, wrote: “I have found strength in you, sir.”
Continues after advertising
“Your resilience to return to this great office, despite the persecution and prosecution you faced, all because? Because you wanted to Make Your Country Great Again,” Hernández wrote. “What you have accomplished is unprecedented and truly historic.”
Hernández was convicted last year, but the investigation that led to his arrest began years earlier, before Trump’s first election. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigators and federal prosecutors in Manhattan went through a chain of collaborators involved in what they said — and multiple juries agreed — was a conspiracy to traffic huge quantities of cocaine through Honduras to the United States.
In the letter, however, Hernández characterized the case as a shady operation conducted by unscrupulous prosecutors in an office that Trump has always despised — the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — and run by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The description was reminiscent of how Trump frequently refers to the four criminal cases against him.
Continues after advertising
“The politicization and selective application of justice in my case is undeniable,” wrote Hernández, adding: “I was prosecuted without solid evidence, based on the testimonies of violent drug traffickers and professional liars motivated by revenge and deals to get out of prison.”
He also sought to remind Trump of their personal relationship, recalling comments Trump made at the Israeli-American Council National Summit in 2018, at which he spoke about stopping the flow of drug trafficking across the southern border.
“We are winning after years and years of losses,” Trump said at the time. “We are stopping drugs at a level that has never happened before.”
Continues after advertising
Hernández, reflecting on these words from prison, informed the president that “these words meant a lot to me, my family and the Honduran people.”
At the beginning of the letter, Hernández used the oft-quoted passage from the Gospel of John: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Trump granted more than 200 pardons and commutations in his first term, most at the end of his term. Biden surpassed that number, and Trump is on track for a similar statistic. So far, he has granted more than 2,000 pardons and commutations, most to people arrested in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Continues after advertising
Stone received a pardon from Trump on the last full day of the president’s first term. Stone was among a small group of people charged and convicted of crimes related to the special counsel’s investigation into possible links between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Stone has maintained his innocence, and Trump and his allies have called that investigation illegitimate for nearly a decade.
c.2025 The New York Times Company
