Federal officials said Hernandez used bribes from drug-trafficking organizations to "fuel his rise" and then provided "support and protection for his co-conspirators, allowing them to move mountains of cocaine, commit acts of violence and murder, and help turn Honduras into one of the most dangerous countries in the world."
Hernandez's involvement in the drug-trafficking operation extended from at least 2004 through 2022, according to DOJ. He was in office until shortly before he was extradited to the U.S. in 2022.
Prosecutor Jacob Gutwillig said during Hernandez’s 2024 sentencing that the former president “corrupted and corroded Honduran government institutions” and protected the drug operation “with the full power of the state.” Hernandez was appealing his conviction when he was pardoned.
Trump said in a social media post that he was issuing the pardon because "people that I greatly respect" told him Hernandez was "treated very harshly and unfairly." Axios reported that longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone lobbied for the pardon.
www.usatoday.com/...
In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlong trial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
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Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)
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While Hernández walks free, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
theintercept.com/...
President Trump is directly and publicly intervening in the elections of a foreign nation and has also promised to grant a pardon to former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who is currently serving a 45-year sentence in US federal prison for, among other things,… pic.twitter.com/iPuAU2GOlA — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 28, 2025
