President Donald Trump made a stunning admission about his pardon of Honduran former President Juan Orlando Hernandez that undercuts his rationale for bombing alleged drug smuggling boats.
The president told Politico’s Dasha Burns in a new interview that he knew "very little about him" before issuing a pardon for his conviction in a U.S. court for drug trafficking, which Trump claimed was "an Obama-Biden type setup," and The New Republic's Greg Sargent said the admission "handed Democrats a new weapon to hound Republicans mercilessly if they fail to exercise oversight over these ongoing crimes."
"This is monumentally deranged stuff," Sargent wrote. "Note that Trump admits he knows next to nothing about Hernandez’s case, even though prosecutors won a conviction after alleging that he helped bring more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States. Trump pardoned him with zero serious reflection on the impact he had on drug use in our country. This is by Trump’s own admission."
Burns asked whether the Hernandez pardon sent "the wrong message to drug dealers," and Trump claimed the former Honduran president had been the victim of “weaponized” government, as he claims to be himself, and Sargent said that was also telling.
"Combine this with Trump’s confession that he granted this pardon because people 'asked me to do it,' and the takeaway is inescapable," Sargent wrote. "He did it as a favor, probably corruptly, or out of his narcissistic association of Hernandez with himself, or a combination of both: His narcissism subjects him to easy manipulation by corrupt actors."
U.S. troops have killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean Sea on Trump's orders, but the administration has not presented serious evidence that any of them were smuggling drugs into the United States, and Trump told Bash he's considering an invasion of Venezuela and a dramatic escalation of his bombing campaign by targeting Mexico and Colombia.
"Trump’s disastrous admissions in this interview reveal again that he is profoundly, catastrophically unfit to be making any of these decisions," Sargent wrote. "By even the most minimal standard of public service, this should induce more Republicans to get to the bottom of all of it. Democrats should use these new revelations to hound them relentlessly if they refuse, as they surely will."