The former leader of Honduras got 45 years for protecting drug cartels that supplied the U.S. Trump said it was all a Biden setup.

This is the second installment of the series “Justice Interrupted.” MS NOW is examining President Donald Trump’s clemency decisions, which many experts have said amount to the most random and reckless use of that presidential power in American history.

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In June 2024, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel, an appointee of Republican George W. Bush, sentenced the former president of Honduras to 45 years in prison after a federal jury convicted him of a massive drug trafficking conspiracy.

Defendant Juan Orlando Hernández was a “two faced politician hungry for power,” according to Castel. Hernández, he said, presided over a vast conspiracy, and some of its members were responsible for a “staggering” number of killings. “There is a need for just punishment. Mr. Hernandez was a facilitator of drug trafficking. He knew and understood the violence that accompanies drug trafficking, and in facilitating trafficking, he knowingly facilitated the violence,” Castel said at Hernández’s sentencing. 

“He knew the weaponry that was used by the drug traffickers he facilitated. Because the cocaine was transshipped through Honduras, and destined for the United States, he also facilitated disease, addiction, violence, and incarceration that accompanies cocaine trafficking in communities within the United States.”

“I wish for the victims of the crimes in this case that there is a small degree of closure,” the judge added.

There was also some hope that Hondurans would also feel some closure. 

“It also meant for the Honduran people, the feeling or the expectations that justice would be done somewhere, that these levels of impunity would not continue,” Helena Olea, deputy director of advocacy group Alianza Americas, told MS NOW.  

Any such closure was short lived.  

Less than 18 months later, President Donald Trump pardoned Hernández, freeing him from federal prison.  The pardon came after Trump’s longtime adviser, Roger Stone — himself pardoned — delivered a letter to Trump from the former Honduran leader, who had maintained his innocence throughout his trial.

“Many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,” Trump said in explaining the pardon. “They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”

In fact, the case against Hernández originated in the first Trump administration and included direct evidence that the then-president of Honduras took bribes from drug lords. Among the supervising prosecutors was Emil Bove, who would go on to become Trump’s defense attorney and a senior official in his second-term Justice Department.  

The case was investigated and prosecuted by career public servants. Multiple people involved in the case told MS NOW that American domestic politics had nothing to do with it.

“It defies explanation,” said Thomas Padden, a former Justice Department prosecutor who directed the now defunct Organized Crime and Drug Task Force, which supervised the Hernández investigation.

“It makes you wonder what was going on that the president of the United States would pardon somebody who was convicted with overwhelming evidence and did so much harm to people in his country and the United States,” Padden said.

Trump’s pardon of Hernández was especially confounding to career agents at the Drug Enforcement Administration, given that a month after it happened, the president sent the U.S. military on a risky operation into Venezuela to capture that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, to face strikingly similar drug trafficking charges. 

The same senior DEA agent led both investigations, former U.S. officials familiar with the matter told MS NOW, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case. It took a huge bureaucratic effort to get the U.S. government to get fully behind criminal investigations into two Latin American heads of state, they said.

“This was a travesty,” a former DEA agent said.

The former officials said it took a major diplomatic effort to get Honduras to agree to extradite Hernández after he left office.

“I hate it. It’s a horrible message,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said after the pardon but before the operation to capture Maduro. 

“It’s confusing to say on the one hand we should potentially even consider invading Venezuela for drug traffick[ing], and on the other hand let somebody go.”

Trump has wielded his clemency power as no president ever has, granting pardons and commutations to a long list of fraudsters, corrupt politicians and others convicted of serious crimes who have never publicly expressed remorse.  

He’s granted clemency to a Chinese crypto billionaire, a former Colorado elections clerk convicted of election security breaches and at least 169 people convicted of assaulting police in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The president has bypassed the Justice Department rules that have been in place for decades, which generally require that pardon recipients have served most of their sentence and express contrition.

Few of these people would have received clemency in any other administration, experts say. Many of them have been Trump supporters or have hired lawyers with connections to the president. While there’s no evidence of quid pro quo agreements, some have contributed to Trump campaigns or have done business with the Trump family.

That list includes Italian Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, pardoned in January after his daughter donated $3.5 million to a Trump super PAC. He also hired former Trump lawyer Christopher Kise.

Convicted fraudster Paul Walczak was pardoned in April 2025 after his mo ther contributed $1 million to a Trump super PAC.

“Money and influence are playing a tremendous role in the pardon process under Donald Trump,” said Elizabeth Oyer, who was the DOJ’s pardons attorney until she was fired last year — after she balked, she said, at restoring the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson, who was convicted of a domestic violence charge. 

Trump “has essentially created a pay-for-play clemency system,” Oyer said. “He’s created a whole pardon economy where people in his orbit are enriching themselves by accepting fees to lobby for clemency on behalf of clients. He is putting himself in a position where he is giving clemency to people he’s got business relationships with, and that is benefiting himself and his family and his friends tremendously. It has really become just a very corrupt pay-for-play system.”

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“The pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez was a blow to the Honduran people … It really meant that any type of crime does not really face a true punishment in the country.”

Helena Olea, human rights lawyer and deputy director, Alianza Americas

Few of the pardons have been as consequential or mystifying as the one handed to Hernández.  Prosecutors presented evidence at trial that he took millions in bribes from cartels, including the vicious Sinaloa Cartel, that Trump has called a major threat to the United States.

Evidence showed that he used the bribes to finance his political campaigns and that he extradited rival traffickers while protecting his co-conspirators, including his brother, who was also convicted in a U.S. court and sentenced to life in prison.

In 2019 an alleged drug trafficker who possessed a ledger that officials say incriminated the Hernández brothers was brutally murdered in prison. DEA agents believed he would have been a witness against the president, people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.

In a text message to MS NOW, Roger Stone acknowledged delivering a pardon request letter from Hernández to Trump. He dismissed the case as weak: It was based, he said, entirely on the testimony of two drug traffickers.

But there were also documents, including the ledger connected to the murdered potential witness. A Honduran accountant testified that he saw Hernández accept bribes.  And the girlfriend of a member of MS-13 testified about collaboration between that lethal gang and Honduran police, as prosecutors painted a picture of profound corruption under Hernández’s presidency. 

“The pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández was a blow to the Honduran people,” Olea, the human rights attorney, told MS NOW. 

“It really meant that any type of crime does not really face a true punishment in the country. … If even someone like Juan Orlando Hernández, with such grave crimes committed after he was sentenced in a court in the United States, could be pardoned, then all levels of impunity are possible,” Olea said.

“It also meant losing that hope for some levels of accountability and a new beginning in the country.”

After Hernández was released from prison in West Virginia, Pro Publica reported that a Bureau of Prisons team drove him at taxpayer expense to New York City, where he stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, according to records and three people familiar with the situation.

In response to a question about that, a Justice Department spokeswoman did not dispute it. “We can confirm that BOP took all measures necessary to ensure his safe transition to his attorney in NY,” she said. “It is standard practice at BOP to ensure all individuals are released safely. Hernandez is a former head of state who had no friends or family close to where he was released.”

Hernández later appeared on Stone’s radio show.

“You did a very important job,” he said to Stone. “I really appreciate the way you handled this … whoever knows my case in detail, they really know that I was wrongfully convicted.”

Ridiculous, Padden and other law enforcement officials say.

“He received a 45-year sentence,” Padden said. “I think it was a righteous investigation and righteous charges.”

He said the message to federal law enforcement was bleak.

“Even if you weren’t risking your life — and that was happening in this kind of an investigation — you’re spending hours away from your family,” Padden said. “You’re missing family events, you’re not going to weddings, you’re working weekends, you’re working long hours as you do surveillance and perform undercover missions and things like that. So after all that work at great personal sacrifice and great personal risk, we might just pardon and let the bad guy go.”

After his release, Hernández posted a video message on Facebook in English, proclaiming his innocence and blaming the “radical left” and the Biden administration for what he called a “setup.”  But he also addressed Trump directly, expressing gratitude for receiving his pardon.  

“You changed my life, sir. And I will never forget it.”

Nora McKee contributed to this reporting.

Ken Dilanian

Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.