Phang: How Trump's Pardons Make a Mockery of the U.S. Justice System
A veteran prosecutor who specialized in narcotics cases offers a splendid rant detailing how the rank hypocrisy of the pardon of Juan Hernandez by our mob boss president weakens law enforcement.
By Katie Phang /Law and Disorder
Fasten your seatbelts because I’m pissed. I’m going to channel my inner-Tupac to capture the essence of the moment: F—- you Convicted Felon Donald Trump. F—- you for making our cities more dangerous and for making a mockery of the lifework of those that labor long hours at low pay – when the government isn’t shutdown - to investigate and prosecute the criminals that jeopardize our safety.
My rant is well-placed so let me explain:
Over the past ten months, we have watched Trump issue a series of pardons that only make sense if their purpose is to enrich Trump, his family members, or hangers-on. Whether you are a corrupt politician, Ponzi schemer, insurrectionist, or healthcare fraudster, you will get a pass if you hire the right people in Trump’s orbit to sing your praises and otherwise come ready to pay-to-play.
But the NEW wave of pardons Trump has unleashed — particularly his recently-announced pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was convicted in federal court for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns, marks a descent into something far more dangerous: Trump is now blessing the drug trade while simultaneously blowing vessels and people out of the water because they’re a part of…the drug trade.
Convicted Felon Trump Meet Convicted Felon Hernandez. Appreciate at the outset that typically the United States Attorney’s Office doesn’t take on a case unless they believe they can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused committed the identified criminal act(s). That’s a high burden and because of this approach, the federal government sometimes passes on cases. Bottom-line, limited resources must be devoted to almost certain guaranteed wins.
And in this instance, the government had an airtight case. The evidence against Hernandez was F—-ING OVERWHELMING. Let me repeat: F—-ING OVERWHELMING.
At trial, the Government called multiple cooperating narco traffickers and others who all testified about Hernandez taking millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for him directing Honduran security forces to protect drug shipments destined for the United States and elsewhere.
The government also introduced written and recorded contemporaneous communications and financial records – remember, emails and bank statements never suffer from amnesia– detailing the extent of Hernandez’s personal and direct criminality. And as if that weren’t enough, the government also introduced Hernandez’s communications with his own brother – separately convicted on drug charges – about their criminal activity.
There was no defense case.
In sum, the government was peak Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen on a fast break against a hapless broken-down Bill Laimbeer. The government’s case was so strong that the jury only needed a few hours to come back with a verdict: GUILTY on ALL counts. Hernandez ultimately received a prison sentence of 45 YEARS in federal prison for flooding our country with drugs.
And now Trump is going to flush all of this work down the toilet, including taking a dump on the hard work of the jury that was just doing its civic duty.
What’s the explanation?
Don’t expect a cogent one from Trump. Rather, he just resorted to the usual: “According to many people that I greatly respect, [Hernandez was] treated very harshly and unfairly.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that those same “people” Trump is referring to got a few dollars before taking up Hernandez’s cause and whispering in Trump’s ear. Perhaps someone should confront Pamela Jo Bondi at her next presser and ask her what in fact was so “harsh” or “unfair” about Hernandez’s prosecution. Maybe she has a report sitting on her desk - next to the Epstein client list? - justifying Trump’s latest act of idiocy.
Or maybe the highest moron in the land that is in charge of law enforcement will give us another memorable “there’s information; new information; additional information” comment to make us derisively laugh and forget for a brief moment there is no defense against this stupidity.
The Message to Law Enforcement. This pardon clearly contradicts Trump’s narrative regarding Venezuela and its narco-regime. And when you consider the fact that the presiding judge in Hernandez’s case called him “a two-faced politician hungry for power” that pretended to be an anti-drug crusader while simultaneously being best buddies with narco-traffickers, then Trump’s pardon makes total sense.
Trump and Hernandez are just two peas in a pod.
Since 1971, we have spent over $1 trillion dollars to combat the war on drugs. Whether you agree with the government’s approach to this war is a subject beyond this space. But we all know that our communities and cities have been ravaged by the drug trade and its attendant violence.
And if David Simon of The Wire fame has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t waste time focusing our resources on street level busts. Rather, we must focus on the kingpins and those in power to make a dent. And the Hernandez prosecution was exactly that.
Hernandez’s prosecution began in Trump Regime 1.0 and concluded in the Biden Administration. The manhours and resources that went into the Hernandez case both at the law enforcement and then prosecution level must have been extensive.
I speak from experience. I worked as a prosecutor for more than 10 years of my professional legal career. During that time, I was detailed to a specialized narcotics unit at the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office, wherein I aggressively pursued high-level narcotics traffickers and worked extensively with local, state, and federal law enforcement officers in multi-defendant, multi-jurisdictional cases.
I partnered with federal prosecutors and law enforcement in a Miami-based High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program. The amount of time we collectively devoted to curbing the drug trade was immense. The Hernandez prosecution of a former head of state with his own incredible resources, is even more sophisticated, time-consuming, and high-stakes. Bottom-line, when you shoot at the king, you cannot miss.
Thus in pardoning Hernandez, Trump has once again lifted his tiny hand and given law enforcement a big middle finger, while telling drug traffickers: Go ahead, poison our cities and communities, kill our citizens and enrich yourself in the process.
The federal government spent a decade building a case and then obtained a conviction? Who cares. Because in Trump World, that doesn’t matter. When Trump says we are living in a “Golden Age”, he is only half-right. It’s not a golden age for our economy and working class Americans; rather, there has been no better time to be a criminal, even international ones.
If the response is “who cares about what happens in Honduras?” that’s dead wrong.
The drug trade doesn’t start here. Rather, its origins can be traced to the jungles of South America, and the shipment of chemical precursors from China and other places in the world. Honduras plays a central role in the transit of drugs to our country as the prosecution laid out in painstaking detail.
Indeed, the drug trade fuels the migration crises that gets MAGA folks all bent out of shape, gang violence, and regional insecurity in our hemisphere.
Our justice system is gone. Presidential pardon power exists at the uneasy intersection between mercy and politics. In recent decades, it increasingly has been abused. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra actors. I know there are others during Obama, Trump 1, and Biden that were optically and substantively bad. In more simple times, Democrats lost their collective shit when Bush just granted clemency – clemency! – to Scooter Libby. (For those keeping score, Trump one-upped Bush and later pardoned Libby).
But pardoning Hernandez is a disgrace and constitutes de facto treason. Where we are now is as follows:
Trump condones drug trafficking to the United States along with its subsequent violence and destabilizing impact on the region as a whole and in our cities and communities in particular.
Trump is telling other corrupt foreign leaders that U.S. “justice” is irrelevant if you fellate someone in his orbit.
Trump is willing to ignore national security for his own idiotic and selfish reasons. If you need more evidence of this, just go read The Wall Street Journal’s recent reporting on the Trump/Witkoff clans’ latest attempts to enrich themselves by selling out Ukraine to Russia.
- Trump conveniently uses “public safety” as a LIE to justify the illegal federalization of the National Guard and military troops in American cities like Chicago to allegedly combat the drug trade that he just blessed.
I guess one positive outcome from this otherwise horrific act of violence on our country is let no Republican who now stands idly by ever lecture a Democrat for being soft on crime going forward.
At any debate, the Democratic candidate’s response should always be the same: “You were silent on Hernandez. So shove it where the sun don’t shine and let’s talk about helping everyday Americans.”
But scoring points at a debate doesn’t interest me much. What I care about is our justice system and the good people in it that devote their lives to it to make us all safer.
That justice system is now a punchline with Trump writing the joke. I, for one, am not laughing.
Katie Phang is a former prosecutor turned legal analyst who writes the “Law and Disorder” newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Image: The Week.