\u201cWell, I was told\u2014I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,\u201d Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. \u201cHe was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"NEW](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/BO26TVVIH5A4RPNHDDY7OHRXLU.jpg\")
Juan Orlando Hernandez served two terms as president of Honduras. Getty Images <\/p>\n
The Justice Department, under former President Joe Biden, had said<\/a> Hernandez \u201cabused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world,\u201d helping heavily armed traffickers smuggle as much as 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.\u2014all while publicly promoting anti-narcotics policies in the Central American nation.<\/p>\n The prosecution of Hernandez began in Trump\u2019s first term and concluded under Biden. Hernandez was extradited to the U.S. in 2022 and sentenced in a New York federal courtroom two years later for taking bribes from drug traffickers to move \u201cwell over approximately 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2021<\/a>, a witness recalled Hernandez as saying, \u201cWe are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos\u2019 noses, and they\u2019re never even going to know it.\u201d<\/p>\n But Trump insisted Sunday that \u201cthe people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe 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 setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with that,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n When a reporter asked him to share any evidence showing that Hernandez was set up, Trump replied: \u201cThey could say that you take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn\u2019t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life. That includes this country.\u201d<\/p>\n The pardon comes as the Trump administration hammers down on boats in the Caribbean that it has accused of ties to drug cartels. Pete Hegseth\u2019s self-anointed War Department has so far killed at least 83 people in 21 strikes since September, according to CNN<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Washington Post<\/a> revealed in a bombshell report that Hegseth handed down an order during a Sept. 2 strike to \u201ckill everybody\u201d\u2014a legally perilous move that experts said could amount to a war crime<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump appeared to know little about the incident.<\/p>\n \u201cNumber one, I don\u2019t know that that happened,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cAnd Pete said he did not want them… he didn\u2019t even know what people were talking about. So we\u2019ll look into it, but no, I wouldn\u2019t have wanted that, not a second strike.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump defended his pardon of a former Honduran president who once bragged that he would \u201cstuff…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[38982,14690,139,141,140,38981],"class_list":["post-66332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-drug-cartels","tag-honduras","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-pete-hegseth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"TEGUCIGALPA,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/JYBGLVBRQBCXFPXX65CMK7IZTQ.jpg\")
Hernandez was extradited to the U.S. in 2022 and later sentenced to 45 years in prison. Getty Images\/Getty Images <\/p>\n