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marmar

(79,057 posts) Tue Dec 2, 2025, 09:32 AM 21 hrs ago

Trump's war on drugs includes some notable exceptions

Trump’s war on drugs includes some notable exceptions
The president's pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández contradicts his strategy. Or does it?

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published December 2, 2025 9:05AM (EST)

(Salon) Over Thanksgiving weekend, President Donald Trump posted an ominous warning on Truth Social: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” People naturally assumed this might mean that the anticipated direct attack on Venezuela was imminent and braced themselves for the inevitable death and destruction. On Sunday, Trump told the media to not “read anything into it.” That changed again on Monday, when reports emerged that during a phone call he made last week to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump advised Maduro he had a week to leave the country.

....(snip)....

The reason for all this is Trump’s war on what he says are Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” that are attacking the United States under Maduro’s leadership. (The “cartel” he is alleged to be leading is not actually a cartel, but that’s just an inconvenient detail.) During the first Trump administration in 2020, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and 14 others on charges of narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other crimes “expressly intending to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and wellbeing of our nation.”

....(snip)....

How odd then that Donald Trump, the crusading scourge of drug kingpins everywhere, would announce, seemingly out-of-the-blue, that he will pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who is currently serving a 45-year sentence in the United States for trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the country. After interfering in yet another Latin American election by promising to shower the country with American largesse if they vote for his chosen right-wing authoritarian leader — or withdrawing all American support if they don’t — Trump dropped the bombshell in the middle of a Truth Social post saying that according to people he greatly respects, Hernández was treated very harshly and unfairly. The whole case, Trump explained, was nothing but a Joe Biden set-up and that you don’t blame a president just because someone in his country is a drug-runner.

....(snip)....

But there were a number of well-paid lobbyists working to get Trump to pardon Hernández, and one of his most trusted advisers, Roger Stone, recently began boosting the case by talking up what he called “the relatively obscure charter city experiment known as Próspera (that was) founded in 2017 as an experiment in freedom.” Crucially, it was founded in Honduras by an American company and “funded through venture capital from Silicon Valley luminaries like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman.” Stone’s claims that Próspera is a libertarian utopia is not widely held, and Honduras’ current government is hostile to the experiment, which explains why it was so important to persuade Trump to weigh in on the current election. Oh, and there’s also a Bitcoin connection. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/02/trumps-war-on-drugs-includes-some-notable-exceptions/

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Trump's war on drugs includes some notable exceptions (Original Post) marmar 21 hrs ago OP

He is a total fraud. On his second day in office, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was serving life in prison. walkingman 21 hrs ago #1

MaddowBlog-Trump to add notorious Honduran drug trafficker to his list of scandalous pardons LetMyPeopleVote 16 hrs ago #2

walkingman

(10,197 posts)

1. He is a total fraud. On his second day in office, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who was serving life in prison.

Reply to marmar (Original post)

Tue Dec 2, 2025, 09:50 AM

21 hrs ago

Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, the world’s largest online drug marketplace. In 2015, Ulbricht was convicted on seven counts, including distributing narcotics and conspiring to launder money, for his involvement with Silk Road.
Silk Road facilitated over 1.5 million transactions, generating more than $200 million in revenue from the sale of heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs.

“I just want to raise the obvious question. If illicit narcotics trafficking is sufficient to declare a national emergency, then why, one day later, was it a justifiable, appropriate, laudable use of presidential power to give a pardon to somebody who had set up an online global digital drug trafficking network that had generated $200 million in revenue, 1.5 million transactions of sales of illicit drugs, six overdose deaths of individuals, and other challenges?”- U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA)

LetMyPeopleVote

(173,407 posts)

2. MaddowBlog-Trump to add notorious Honduran drug trafficker to his list of scandalous pardons

Reply to marmar (Original post)

Tue Dec 2, 2025, 03:01 PM

16 hrs ago

If the president believes the U.S. is at war with drug traffickers, why does he want to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández?

Trump to add notorious Honduran drug trafficker to his list of scandalous pardons share.google/3055wBRsfyvV...
— (@vinnyfaye.bsky.social) 2025-12-01T17:49:44.528Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-to-add-notorious-honduran-drug-trafficker-to-his-list-of-scandalous-pardons

For those unfamiliar with Hernández, this might not have seemed especially notable, but consider this striking summary published by The New York Times:

He once boasted that he would ‘stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.’ He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him. At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

Hernández was convicted last year in a sweeping drug-trafficking case and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Trump, however, is undoing all of that — to the great surprise of both Hondurans and U.S. officials who’d invested enormous resources in building a successful case against the former leader.

If the Republican follows through on his announcement, the result will reinforce a ridiculous dynamic, even by 2025 standards: While Trump and his administration claim that the U.S. is engaged in a literal armed conflict against foreign drug traffickers, the American president has vowed to pardon a notorious foreign drug trafficker.

Reporter: You have made so clear how you want to keep drugs out of the USâ€”

Trump: Right

Reporter: Can you explain why you would pardon a notorious drug trafficker?

Trump: If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesnâ€™t mean you arrest the president
— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-11-30T23:16:55.102Z

...I’m mindful that the American president’s pardon pen has been getting a workout in recent weeks. We’ve seen Trump extend clemency to, among others, the spouse of a congressional loyalist; those who helped him try to overturn the 2020 election results; some Jan. 6 rioters who apparently needed a re-pardon; nursing home magnate Joseph Schwartz, who paid lobbyists almost $1 million in the hopes of receiving presidential clemency; and the man who helped finance the president’s stablecoin and put money in the Trump family’s pockets.

But just when it seemed the list couldn’t get more outlandish, the Republican incumbent made matters even worse the day after Thanksgiving.

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