Bulwark Takes - Trump's Honduras Pardon Looks Worse and Worse

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Saletan take on Trump’s bizarre pardon of the former President of Honduras—how he was nudged into it by friends and fixers, why the story he repeated falls apart, and what this decision means for U.S. credibility, drug enforcement, and the growing pattern of Trump siding with corrupt leaders over the law. Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/BULWARKTAKES. Promo Code BULWARKTAKES

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Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the Bullwark. I'm here with Will Salton. We're going to be talking today about one of the more egregious pardons, although Will makes a very valid case that it's not the most egregious pardon over the Thanksgiving break. President Trump announced he was going to deliver a, quote, full and complete pardon to former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is at the center of this incredibly sweeping drug case. He's found guilty of kind of conspiring to import and distribute enough cocaine to make everyone in the United States incredibly high and kill a bunch of people. He was found to have been collaborating with El Chapo, using the military to cover it up and threaten opponents. It was a sprawling drug scheme. And seemingly out of nowhere, Trump just announces, I mean, really out of nowhere, he just announces that he's going to give the guy a pardon. And then he was approached.

Trump was approached about this on Air Force One on Sunday when he was returning from Mar-a-Lago, which is where he issued the pardon from. And he had this to say. The people of Honduras really thought he was set up and it was a terrible thing. He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration set up. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them. What do you share that he was set up?

When you take a look, I mean, they could say that you take any country you want. If somebody sells Trump's in that country, that doesn't mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of this. That includes this country, okay, to be honest. I mean, if somebody does something wrong, you put president of the country in jail. They said it was a Biden set up. It was a Biden administration set up. Well, what do you make of this? I mean, it's like hard to kind of put your head around all of it.

Okay, first of all, Trump says that the people of Honduras told him to pardon this guy. The people of Honduras did not tell him to pardon this guy, right? Wait, hold on. You don't think Trump's been like doing push polls and things on the Lundon? He's got his finger on the pulse. There's another place where Trump says that many friends of Trump's, you know, it told them do it. So many friends of Trumps are not the Honduran people, right? The Honduran people to Trump are just another one of those brown people that he doesn't want in America, right?

But the friends of this former president of Honduras are connected with the friends of Donald Trump. And they sort of, you know, through the back channel, through Roger Stone and some other people clearly like got to Trump and told them to pardon this guy. And the case, then there's the case that they used. And when Trump says in that exchange on Air Force One that they only went after this guy because, He was the president of the country. A, that's wrong. They actually convicted him in the U.S. Court of Drug Trafficking based on lots and lots of evidence. This guy literally took bribes from Melchapo and stuff.

But also, the fact that the guy was a former president is a part of the reason why Trump identifies with him. He is a former president who was convicted of a crime. And Trump says, you know, in that exchange, it's that includes this country going after. after a former president. So he's basically saying the Biden administration went after this former president. They went after me as a former president. So he has this brotherhood with this convicted criminal. Yes. And I just think it's worth sort of, and again, I didn't really know much about this case at all. So I'm not like pretending to be an expert. But like the basic facts are pretty available for anyone who wants to do some preliminary research. And they pretty clearly undercut everything

that Trump's talking about. So, for instance, yes, the prosecution of this ex-president did happen during Biden's term. It concluded during Biden's term in office, but it originated in Trump's first term in office, okay? Like, Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in prison, but it started, the prosecution started under Donald Trump. So that alone is sort of silly. But the thing that really tickled me, and they're, you know, they're saying, well, this is just like, you know, a classic Biden era, prosecution, a corrupt lawfare, going after political foes. The lawyer who went after the president's brother, who was a congressman in Honduras, and was found to have assisted in all of this, the lawyer who did that was an assistant

U.S. attorney at the Southern District of New York. You may know the name and may ring familiar. Emil Bovey, who was Trump's personal lawyer, who then went on to, like, staff Trump's Justice Department and do all the stuff, the corrupt stuff around Mayor Adams and then got rewarded with a judgeship. So under Trump's, you know, weird, the White House's weird argument, Bovi was in on some sort of lawfare prosecution of the scheme to entrap the Honduran president. It makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah.

Okay. So first of all, Sam, the fact that Emil Bovey was directly involved in this, tells you that Trump didn't do any vetting of this at all. Like, I don't know, I don't know what was the channel by which these guys got to Trump and said, hey, this guy's like you, for, you know, victimized former president, lawfare, all that stuff. If Trump had just put out the word to, like, his most senior justice people, like, Boevee would have been included, of course.

Somebody, Bovi would have raised his hand and said, you know, actually, I was actually involved in this prosecution, right? So this wasn't cleared with anybody. And by the way, Sam, as we speak, there still hasn't been any follow-up from Trump about, like, he's made this. Clearly, he was unprepared. He didn't know anything about this case other than he was told this garbage about the Honduran people and the victimization of this guy. So there was no vetting, and he still, to this moment, doesn't have a good defense. Bullwark takes is sponsored by ORAFraim's.

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So there was some, not from Trump, but Carolyn Levin, the press secretary, was asked about this on Monday. The context of the question was, okay, you're engaged in this incredibly, you know, I don't even know what to call it, like post-legal, you know, military campaign against drug smugglers in the Caribbean, and you're doing it under the guys that the Venezuelan government is flooding the country with illegal drugs. At the same time, you're pardoning this president, this ex-president of Honduras.

Like, how does this make sense? Like, aren't these two things? in direct contradiction. How are you giving leniency to the drug kingpin, but going after the drug smugglers? And this is what she had to say. The people of Honduras have highlighted to him how the former president Hernandez was set up. This was a clear Biden over prosecution. He was the president of this country. He was in the opposition party. He was opposed to the values of the previous administration. And they charged him because he was president of Honduras. There were some other egregious facts that came out during this trial, and I would encourage you to report on them. His court-appointed lawyer was only given three weeks to prepare for trial. He shared that

his conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who, quote, struck a deal with the Biden-Harris administration. Hernandez has highlighted there was virtually no independent evidence presented, and many of his conviction was based on testimony from many admitted criminals who hoped that cooperating would reduce their own penalties. So the president heard the concerns from many people, as he does. And he's, of course, within his constitutional authority to sign clemency for whomever he deems worthy of that. How do you make of that in terms of a response? Okay. So, yeah, this is the follow-up from Caroline Levitt. So she's reading from a script here. She's been given these talks to points. So she's delivering the same thing Trump said. She says the same

thing about the people of Honduras, which we just established as total garbage, right? Then she goes on, talks about the Biden over prosecution. So you've got like identify with Joe Biden, therefore it's wrong. She says there, Sam, she says that the lawyer for Juan Orlando Hernandez was given only three weeks to prepare for the trial. Sam, you just read from the story. This prosecution began in the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, years and years. So like, she's not doing the most basic research. Well, I don't know. She just doesn't care.

They just lie about this. Only three weeks to prepare. Absolute garbage, right? She says that, and she used the word that we were just using law. fair, you know, he was that, and she says, she says, she uses lovely word shared. You hear this term shared. The convicted criminal shared with us. In other words, he gave us his version of events, which was like totally refuted at trial, that this was, that there was no real evidence, and this was all lawfare by the leftist party. But all she, all she has to do is repeat the magic

words, Biden. Biden left is Biden there. So if it was done by the Biden administration, even if the prosecution began under the Trump administration by and was part of like connected to Trump's own lawyer no it's so true yeah and Sam do you remember do you and I did the interview did the video did the video about the 60 Minutes interview and we counted how many times they mentioned Biden yeah it's the through line of all this if Biden did it it has to be bad right totally and Sam it just underscores how I so people are going to get pissed to me if I use this word gullible Trump is gullible okay he's a liar right and he's a scoundrel and a criminal and all that but he is all right but he is all Also, all you have to do is say the magic words, Joe Biden, Democrats, leftists, liberals.

And if you can associate, if you can be like, if you can say that Hernandez and his party were opposed by the Biden administration and that he was prosecuted under the Biden administration, even though it began under Trump, that's the magic words that will get Trump to instantly identify with your client. And that's what happened. 100%. 100%. And Andrew Rager wrote about this a little bit in morning shots about how. There is like a throughline of all these international leaders that Trump feels have been prosecuted unfairly and that he has some sort of, you know, compassion for because he believes he too was prosecuted unfairly. And you did reference it. It appears, I don't think it's been supported, but I mean publicly, Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally has been advocating for Hernandez's behalf. I just want to end, though, on, you know, we're sort of like making light of this. And I don't think it's obviously something to make light of, right?

Like, it's ridiculous. But I want to quote from the Times piece that wrote about this guy named Mike Vigil, who is a former chief of international operations at the Drug Enforcement Agency. So he no longer is there, but he was there. The Times rights, he reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking. Quote, this action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community.

And that is true. Like, if you're going to just start pardoning the people who run this stuff, it's hard to imagine how that actually gets you to the policy objective that you ostensibly want, which is to eliminate or limit the drug trade. But there's no real consistency here from this administration. No, no. Can I go really dark, Sam? Let me go really dark with this thing for a minute. Why not? So one of the things that Caroline Levitt said in that press conference was that the test of some of the testimony, she said, the testimony against Hernandez came from admitted criminals.

Well, that's how you get a drug kingpin, right? You get people in the organization to testify against him. But who do they think is going to testify against the guy? Right. But let me, here's where the dark part comes in. In the New York Times story about this, the history of this thing, they said, Not only were there people who testify, they're people who couldn't testify because they got killed. Okay.

And this is a paragraph of the Times story. Investigator said that Mr. Hernandez went to pitiless lengths to cover his tracks. One accused co-conspirator was killed in a Honduran prison to protect the president, according to court documents. So that's how one way you do. You get rid of the people underneath you who could testify against you. Sam, what are we doing with these boats in Venezuela? we're a we're like blowing them up we're killing then then according to this the washington post story we go back and we kill them off we we could we could board these boats and then we would

get testimony from people and the testimony from people who are farying drugs often implicates people above them who ask them to do it but if you kill them if you kill them they can't testify so i'm not saying this is a conspiracy but it is awfully convenient that what we're doing to the drugboats is killing the little guys and making sure that none of them are alive to testify against the kingpins. We give pardons to the kingpin. Yeah, even if it's not a conspiracy, it's just obviously an ineffectual way to do this, because if you really want to choke off the trade, you'd go after the big players in it, and the way to do that is to talk to the people who are smuggling. And it's not just the Washington Post reporting it, by the way. The White House

now emits openly that they ordered a second tap strike. And so they are embracing this. under the guise and hopefully we can get another video on this under the guys that those two people who were clinging to the boat after it's hit the first time posed an imminent threat to our national security I don't really see it we'll see all right well I appreciate your expertise on the drug trade I knew I tapped the right person don't say tap don't say tap sorry I knew I got the right person to come on talk about this I'm definitely a drug guy man this is why we have you

all right will sound then everyone who watches us Thank you for doing this and enduring this. Subscribe to the feed as pity for both of us. Thank you. Take care, bud.