"In Announcing Pardon of Drug Trafficker While Threatening Venezuela, Trump Displays Contradictions"
...from a NYT article today...have to wonder how much Sr. Hernandez will transfer from his Narco Account to DJT for that Pardon. MAGAs could care less.
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President Trump and his top aides have said that drug cartels present one of the most pressing dangers to the United States, and have promised to eradicate them from the Western Hemisphere.
As part of that effort, Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.
The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.”
“We blow up ‘alleged’ drug boats in the Caribbean but pardon actually convicted drug traffickers in the U.S.,” Todd Robinson, who served as the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Someone help me make sense of this.”
In a statement, Mr. Trump said he had issued the pardon because “many friends” had asked him to do so, adding, “They gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country — you could do this to any president on any country.” (After Mr. Trump left office, he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, related to the reimbursement of hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up a sex scandal around the 2016 presidential election.)
Over the last several weeks, senior officials have made clear that the administration is focused on taking on drug cartels in the Caribbean and South America.
“We are going to make sure that the American people are safe and protected from transnational organized crime,” Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, told reporters earlier this month. “Venezuela is run by a narcoterrorist ring that traffics drugs, weapons, human traffics, as well, into the United States.”
And just over two hours after Mr. Trump’s announcement of a pardon for Mr. Hernández, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
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The Trump administration is nothing more than an out-of-control Criminal Enterprise.