The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal; Trump’s Pardon for Cocaine Juan: A jury found Honduras’s former President guilty. Why set him free?
"President Trump, like other politicians, sometimes does something unpopular to please his base. But what is the audience for Mr. Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández?"
William K. Rashbaum, Maggie Haberman, Kenneth P. Vogel and Jonah E. Bromwich, The New York Times; Former President of Honduras Is Freed From Prison After Trump Pardon
"President Trump formally pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras on Monday evening, fulfilling a vow he had made days before to free an ex-president who was at the center of what the authorities had characterized as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”"
Tom Phillips, The Guardian ; Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’
"He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.
“[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.
The description might sound like a sketch of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who Donald Trump’s administration has accused of being a “narco-terrorist” kingpin and is trying to topple with a $50m bounty and a huge display of military might off the South American country’s Caribbean coast.
But it is actually a portrait – painted by US prosecutors, no less – of the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who Trump last week pledged to pardon, despite the fact that Hernández was sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”."
CREW/Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; CREW statement on Menendez sentencing
"Following the sentencing of former Senator Bob Menendez, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington President Noah Bookbinder, a former federal corruption prosecutor, released the following statement:
“Bob Menendez’s blatant corruption made a mockery of the Senate and was one more piece of the shattering of Americans’ trust in our government in recent years. We applaud Judge Stein for handing down a serious sentence in line with these very serious offenses. By sending Menendez to prison, the judge has shown that the system can work. And Americans can feel secure in the knowledge that, in at least some cases, corruption does not go unpunished.”"
Jeremy Pelzer, cleveland.com; Why haven’t Ohio lawmakers passed any ethics reforms since Larry Householder’s arrest?
"Nearly three years after ex-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was arrested for overseeing the largest bribery scheme in state history, Ohio lawmakers haven’t passed a single piece of legislation to change state ethics or campaign-finance law."
