A great many people are having a hard time understanding the logic of Donald Trump's official pardon for ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
Hernandez is serving a 45-year sentence in the high security USP Hazelton prison in West Virginia for his role in trafficking some 400 tons of cocaine into the USA. No-one is quite sure why Trump has pardoned him, given his administration's supposed strong anti-drugs stance (think bombing Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, punitive tariffs against Canada for its supposed role in the US fentanyl trade, etc).
Even members of his own party are questioning the action: "Why would we pardon this guy and then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States?" (Republican Senator Bill Cassidy).
Perfectly good question, with no good answer. The best we can do is to assume that the pardon was Trump's attempt to meddle in the ongoing election in Honduras, in which Trump would prefer to see the right-wing National Party candidate triumph (Hernández's old party). That, and he would, of course, like to be seen as doing the exact opposite of whatever the Biden administration did (Hernández was tried and convicted by Biden's Justice Department).
It's not a very convincing explanation, although why we are still looking for logic and sense in Trump's decisions is beyond me. Maybe he just wants to sow doubt in people's minds about the whole US legal system, which is still attacking Trump on several fronts. Who knows what the guy is thinking?
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