Even President Donald Trump’s own chief of staff was surprised by his swift pardon of a former Honduran president who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”
Susie Wiles and other senior administration officials did not receive advance notice of Trump’s controversial pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Wiles, 68, has long wielded great power in Trump’s orbit, with the president nicknaming her the “Ice Maiden.” More recently, he referred to her as “Susie Trump” in a bizarre speech that preceded her shockingly candid tell-all with Vanity Fair.
Former Trump adviser Roger Stone, who lobbied for the pardon after reviewing the case, told people that he was also stunned by the president’s speed, the Journal reported.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
Hernández, 57, was sentenced to 45 years in prison last year for conspiring with heavily armed drug traffickers to smuggle a staggering 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.—while publicly promoting anti-narcotics policies in Honduras. The U.S. had been investigating him since 2013. He was extradited in 2022 and convicted under the administration of former President Joe Biden.
During a trial in 2021, a witness recalled Hernandez as saying, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
But Trump announced in a November Truth Social post that he was granting “a Full and Complete Pardon” to Hernández, who he claimed had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
“Well, I was told—I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,” Trump said earlier this month. “He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
After a reporter pressed him to share evidence proving that Hernández was set up, Trump responded: “They could say that you take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life. That includes this country.”
Politico continued to grill him on the controversy just days later, forcing Trump to admit that he knew “very little” about the man he pardoned.
“Well, I don’t know him, and I know very little about him, other than people said it was like a Obama, Biden-type setup,” he said. “There are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know, and they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said, I’ll do it.”
