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Top Trump aide left blindsided by president’s controversial clemency spree
Andrew Feinberg in Washington, D.C. Thursday 25 December 2025 18:39 GMT- Bookmark
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CloseTrump defends pardoning drug trafficking Honduran dictator as he continues 'anti-drug' crusade against Venezuela
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When President Donald Trump sprung former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández from a 45-year prison term he was serving after being convicted of conspiring to smuggle a whopping 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, his most senior White House aide was among the last to be informed.
According to The Wall Street Journal, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and other top advisers were given no advance notice of his decision to issue what he called “a full and complete pardon” to Hernandez, who was described by one witness at his trial of having boasted of plans to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”
At the time, Trump claimed the former Honduran head of state had been ““treated very harshly and unfairly” because his prosecution took place during the Biden administration — even though the probe into his conduct had been led at one point by Emil Bove, the senior federal prosecutor who later served as one of Trump’s personal attorneys before Trump brought him into the Justice Department as a top official and later nominated him to a lifetime appointment as a federal appellate judge.
Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone had lobbied the president to pardon the convicted drug trafficker, but even he told the Journal he was stunned by the speed at which Trump moved to release the notorious criminal from prison and nullify his conviction.
open image in galleryWhite House chief of staff Susie Wiles was reportedly stunned by Donald Trump’s pardon of an ex-Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking. (AP)Despite the overwhelming evidence against Hernández, the president nonsensically claimed that he’d been told by “many of the people of Honduras” that the prosecution of the former politician had been “a Biden setup.”
“He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” he said.
The president later admitted to knowing “very little” about the case and suggested that the pardon was issued at the behest of political allies seeking to ensure that a right-wing, Trump-aligned candidate would win the recent presidential election in Honduras.
“Well, I don’t know him, and I know very little about him, other than people said it was like a Obama, Biden-type setup,” he said. “There are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know, and they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said, I’ll do it.”
Since returning to power in January, Trump has reveled in his use of the presidential pardon, one of the few presidential authorities that cannot be reviewed by the courts or any other branch of government — a power that is almost monarchical in scope because the framers of the U.S. Constitution adapted it from the Royal Prerogative of Mercy enjoyed British kings and queens.
On the day he took office this past January, he issued a sweeping pardon of nearly all of his supporters who’d been convicted of crimes — including violent offenses — committed during the riot he fomented at the U.S. Capitol four years earlier in a last-ditch attempt to prevent certification of his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
open image in gallerySince returning to power in January, Trump has reveled in his use of the presidential pardon. (AFP via Getty Images)Since then, he has made frequent use of the power to absolve the wealthy and well-connected of a string of serious offenses, often after being buttonholed by lobbyists, friends, allies or family members.
In October, he issued a pardon to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, a business associate of his son Donald Trump Jr., who had pleaded guilty to failing to prevent the use of the cryptocurrency exchange he founded by money launderers, including drug dealers and terrorists.
He has also pardoned a string of Republican politicians who’d been accused or convicted of public corruption offenses, each time falsely alleging that they had been improperly targeted for political reasons.
Trump has even granted clemency to a select few Democrats, including ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagoevich (five years after commuting his prison sentence at the end of his first term) and Texas congressman Henry Cuellar.
He alleged that Cuellar, who had been set to face trial for allegedly accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign governments, had been unfairly targeted because he had spoken out against the Biden administration’s lax border policies.
After Cuellar responded by filing for re-election as a Democrat, the president lashed out on social media.
"Such a lack of LOYALTY," Trump wrote. "Oh' well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!"
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