A Lego portrait of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed in the Green Room of the White House during a media preview of the 2025 holiday decorations at the White House in Washington, U.S., December 1, 2025. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz
A conservative legal expert blew a hole in President Donald Trump's attempt to dodge responsibility for pardoning a notorious drug lord.
The president defended his pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted last year by an American jury of conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S., by suggesting the prosecution had been tainted by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
“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 aboard Air Force One on 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.”
Trump pardoned the former Central American leader, who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses," as his administration carries out possibly illegal airstrikes on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean. Conservative attorney Ed Whelan noted another irony in the matter.
"Some hilarious details to add to Trump's outlandish pardon of convicted drug trafficker, and former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández: Then-federal prosecutor Emil Bove led the investigation of Hernández and prosecuted his brother," Whelan posted on X.
Hernández was seen as a flawed ally by the U.S. after his 2014 election, but his first term was plagued by corruption scandals and he was elected to an unconstitutional second term amid widespread fraud allegations and a military crackdown. His brother was arrested on drug trafficking charges while visiting the U.S. in 2018 – during Trump's first term.
"A lead investigator in that case was Emil Bove, then a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and later one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers," the New York Times reported.
"Less than a month after leaving office, in 2022, Mr. Hernández was arrested and later extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking and weapons charges," the Times report added. "During the trial, prosecutors asserted that Mr. Hernández had received millions in bribes from drug traffickers, including $1 million from [Joaquín] Guzmán, the former Sinaloa cartel leader [known as El Chapo] who is imprisoned in the United States."
"When Bove resigned to go into private practice," Whelan noted, "El Salvador president Nayib Bukele taunted that Bove's departure (which Bukele depicted as a firing) showed that the U.S. was on the side of drug traffickers and wasn't serious about justice. Bukele's taunt applies much better to Trump's pardon of Hernández."