THAT WAS FAST

Drug-Running President Pardoned by Trump Already Facing New Legal Trouble

Juan Orlando Hernández was released from a U.S. prison last week —and Honduras has already issued a warrant for his arrest.

Honduras has put out an international arrest warrant for its former leader days after he was released from a U.S. prison thanks to a pardon by President Donald Trump. The country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who served from 2014 to 2022, was arrested less than a month after leaving office and later extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking and weapons charges. He was then sentenced to 45 years in prison. Speaking to reporters last week, Trump insisted that Hernández’s arrest and conviction were a “Biden set-up,” even though the prosecution began during Trump’s first term. The president issued a formal pardon for Hernández on Dec. 1, leading to his release from a federal prison in West Virginia last week. But his legal trouble has not ended, as the Honduran attorney general, Johel Antonio Zelaya Alvarez, announced on Monday that he had issued an international warrant for the arrest of Hernández, citing money laundering and fraud charges that date back to his first term. “We have been wounded by the tentacles of corruption and by the criminal networks that have deeply scarred the life of our country,” Zelaya wrote on X. The Department of Justice said previously that he had overseen “years of destructive narco-trafficking of the highest imaginable magnitude.”

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