President Donald Trump defended his pardon of a former Honduran president who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”
Trump, 79, stood by his announcement on Friday that he would grant “a full and complete pardon” of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the 57-year-old former Honduran leader who was sentenced to 45 years in prison last year after he was convicted of drug trafficking and firearms offenses.
“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.”
The Justice Department, under former President Joe Biden, had said Hernandez “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world,” helping heavily armed traffickers smuggle as much as 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.—all while publicly promoting anti-narcotics policies in the Central American nation.
The prosecution of Hernandez began in Trump’s first term and concluded under Biden. Hernandez was extradited to the U.S. in 2022 and sentenced in a New York federal courtroom two years later for taking bribes from drug traffickers to move “well over approximately 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.”
In 2021, a witness recalled Hernandez as saying, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
But Trump insisted Sunday that “the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing.”
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country, and they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with that,” he claimed.
When a reporter asked him to share any evidence showing that Hernandez was set up, Trump replied: “They could say that you take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life. That includes this country.”
The pardon comes as the Trump administration hammers down on boats in the Caribbean that it has accused of ties to drug cartels. Pete Hegseth’s self-anointed War Department has so far killed at least 83 people in 21 strikes since September, according to CNN.
The Washington Post revealed in a bombshell report that Hegseth handed down an order during a Sept. 2 strike to “kill everybody”—a legally perilous move that experts said could amount to a war crime.
Trump appeared to know little about the incident.
“Number one, I don’t know that that happened,” he told reporters. “And Pete said he did not want them… he didn’t even know what people were talking about. So we’ll look into it, but no, I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”
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