President Trump formally pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras on Monday evening, fulfilling a vow he had made days before to free an ex-president convicted of drug trafficking on a massive scale.
Mr. Trump’s pledge to pardon Mr. Hernández last week came hours after he had received a fawning letter in which Mr. Hernández cast himself as the victim of “political persecution” by the Biden-Harris administration, comparing his fate to that of the American president.
The four-page letter was dated Oct. 28. But it was provided to Mr. Trump by Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime on-and-off political adviser, just hours before Mr. Trump announced his plan to pardon Mr. Hernández, Mr. Stone said on his own radio show on Sunday.
A White House official said Mr. Trump had not seen the letter before he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Friday about the coming clemency grant. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying the administration by matter of routine did not discuss pardons on the record.
Mr. Hernández’s lawyer said on Tuesday that his client had been released from a federal prison in West Virginia. The White House confirmed the pardon had been issued.
The promised pardon had caused an uproar before it was carried out, given the serious narcotics crimes of which Mr. Hernández was convicted and Mr. Trump’s stated ambition of curbing the flow of drugs into the United States, and, in particular, his monthslong push against Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader.
The Trump administration has engaged in a highly controversial and potentially illegal practice of bombing boats in the waters around Venezuela that officials insist are piloted by drug traffickers bringing their wares into the United States. In fact, a separate social media post from the one that promised a pardon for Mr. Hernández argued, shortly before elections in Honduras, that the next president should not give Mr. Maduro greater regional control.
Mr. Hernández’s letter contained all the ingredients that, over time, foreign leaders, lobbyists and others who interact with Mr. Trump have found effective: flattery, a sense of shared persecution and an appeal to Mr. Trump’s perception of himself as the final arbiter of justice.
Addressing Mr. Trump as “your Excellency,” Mr. Hernández, who last year was sentenced to 45 years in prison for flooding the United States with cocaine, wrote, “I have found strength from you, Sir.”
“Your resilience to get back in that great office notwithstanding the persecution and prosecution you faced, all for what, because you wished to make your country Great Again,” Mr. Hernández wrote. “What you accomplished is unprecedented and truly historic.”
Mr. Hernández was convicted last year, but the investigation that led to his imprisonment began years earlier, before Mr. Trump was elected the first time. Investigators with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Manhattan federal prosecutors worked their way up a chain of cooperators involved in what they said — and multiple juries agreed — was a conspiracy to traffic enormous amounts of cocaine through Honduras and into the United States.
In his letter, though, Mr. Hernández characterized the case as a fly-by-night affair run by unscrupulous prosecutors in an office Mr. Trump has long resented — the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York — and directed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris. The description was reminiscent of how Mr. Trump often refers to the four separate criminal cases against him.
“The politicization and selective application of justice in my case is undeniable,” Mr. Hernández wrote in his letter, adding, “I was prosecuted without solid evidence, based on the testimonies of violent traffickers and professional liars motivated by revenge and by get-out-of-jail deals.”
He also worked to remind Mr. Trump of their personal relationship, reminiscing about remarks Mr. Trump had made at the 2018 Israeli American Council National Summit, in which he had spoken about halting the flow of drug trafficking at the Southern border.
“We’re winning after years and years of losing,” Mr. Trump said then. “We’re stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”
Mr. Hernández, reflecting on the remarks from prison, informed the president that “those words meant a great deal to me, my family and the Honduran people.”
At the beginning of his letter, Mr. Hernández used the oft-quoted passage from the Gospel of John: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Mr. Trump issued more than 200 pardons and commutations in his first term, most of them at the very end of his term. Mr. Biden far eclipsed that number, and Mr. Trump is on pace for a similar statistic. So far, he has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations, most of them to people arrested in connection with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Stone received a pardon from Mr. Trump in the final full day of the president’s first term. Mr. Stone was among a small group of people who had been charged and convicted with crimes in connection to the special counsel’s investigation into possible ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Stone maintained his innocence, and Mr. Tump and his allies have viewed that investigation as illegitimate for nearly a decade.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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