CNN’s Elie Honig Torpedoes Trump Excuse for Pardoning Convicted Drug Trafficker

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig torpedoed President Donald Trump’s rationale for pardoning former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced for drug trafficking.

Trump has faced criticism for pardoning Hernandez even as he wages a deadly campaign against alleged Venezuelan drug boats — including one strike in which the survivors were ordered to be killed.

The president has claimed that the imprisonment of Hernandez was the result of a political prosecution by President Joe Biden’s administration.

On Monday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, anchor Kaitlan Collins asked Honig to assess Trump’s explanation, and it went poorly for Trump:

COLLINS: Hernandez had been sentenced, last year, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking offenses. An American jury found that he was guilty of conspiring with cartels, to move 400 tons of cocaine through his home country toward the U.S. The Justice Department estimated that that amounts to approximately 4.5 billion individual doses of this drug.

But the President claimed today that many people have told him that Hernandez had been treated very harshly and unfairly, and that it was all set up by the Biden White House.

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TRUMP: 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 setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.

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COLLINS: My legal sources tonight are:

CNN’s senior legal analyst, Elie Honig.

And former Justice Department pardon attorney herself, Liz Oyer, who was fired by the Trump administration earlier this year.

And Elie, despite what we are hearing from some officials, about this being a Biden setup. Part of this investigation actually started when the President was in office, the first term, President Trump. Because one of the lead investigators who convicted Hernandez’s brother in this scheme, was actually Trump’s own former personal attorney, he would go on to be so, Emil Bove, at your former stomping grounds of SDNY.

Do you believe this was over-prosecution, as the administration is putting it?

ELIE HONIG: Not at all, Kaitlan. And the record proves to the contrary.

So, if you look back at this case, it was charged by the Justice Department, the Southern District of New York. This individual, Mr. Hernandez, was given a three-week jury trial. The judge, Judge Kevin Castel, I’ve tried cases in front of him, very experienced, very fair, tolerates no BS from prosecutors, runs a tight, fair trial. He was convicted by a jury. He was then sentenced to 45 years.

He was actually about to have his appeal argument, next week. And I think it’s worth noting, Kaitlan, that Hernandez’s own lawyers are not even making the kinds of arguments that we just heard from the President. They’re not arguing that this was a setup, or politically- driven, or anything of that nature.

So, whoever these Honduran people are, who are making these statements to the President, I’m not sure who they are. But these claims are completely different from what Hernandez is actually claiming in — or was claiming in court, before the pardon.

COLLINS: Well, one of them actually is Roger Stone, a Trump ally. He’s been elevating this case and talking about this, defending the pardon, as he did today.

Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.