Juan Orlando Hernandez – drug trafficker, former President of Honduras and recent recipient pardon from President Donald Trump — played a key role in what the Justice Department called “one of the largest and most brutal drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Now Hernandez, who reportedly once said his accomplices that they are going to “shove drugs in the noses of gringos”, expresses gratitude to leading figures in MAGA (the movement supposedly advocating to stop the flow of drugs into the United States by any means necessary).
On X Friday Hernandez general his first message since being released from a US prison, where he had served just over a year of a 45-year sentence: an 11-minute speech in Spanish expressing his “deep gratitude to President Donald Trump” and a tweet praising Trump and other key figures in his orbit.
Hernandez especially thanked Roger Stone and Matt Gaetz, allies of the president who played central roles in the campaign for his pardon. (They characterized Hernandez's prosecution in grievance-laden terms that Trump could appreciate as a supposed example of legitimacy on the part of the Biden administration.)
Hernandez also credited White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt, who called the former Honduran president a victim of Biden's “overreach,” as well as Ed Martin, the Justice Department's MAGA pardon lawyer, and Trump's “pardon czar” Alice Marie Johnson.
