U.S. President Donald Trump gestures from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on January 3, 2026, during a press conference following the U.S. attack on Venezuela that captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Syria Flores.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
The Trump administration faces new questions over its recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after the United States arrested Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro on Saturday and charged him with drug trafficking-related crimes.
Hernandez was convicted in 2024 of conspiring with drug traffickers and using his government position to help hundreds of tons of cocaine flow into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
President Donald Trump pardoned Hernandez in November, saying in a post on his Truth Social account that he had been “extremely harsh and wronged.”
Maduro was charged with drug-terrorism conspiracy, along with four other charges. Possession of machine guns and destructive devices. Conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was pressed on Sunday about the apparent contradiction in Mr. Hernandez’s pardon at a time when the United States is seeking similar charges against Mr. Maduro, another South American head of state with ties to drug trafficking.
“I haven’t created the pardon file. I’m not against it, I’m not for it. I haven’t seen the file, so I can’t speak to the dynamics that led to the decisions that the president made,” Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“He reviewed the file, he scrutinized the arguments therein, and he felt that the former president of Honduras was treated very unfairly by the previous administration,” Rubio said.
“Whether you agree with that decision or not, that doesn’t mean we’re going to keep Maduro in office,” Rubio said.
“Whether there’s a problem or not, the answer is to not leave indicted individuals on the battlefield who have not yet received American justice,” Rubio said.
Trump’s pardon of Hernandez had already come under intense scrutiny even before Maduro’s ouster. “The hypocrisy underlying this decision is particularly clear,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
“This same president recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a U.S. court of serious drug trafficking charges, including collusion with drug traffickers, while in office,” Warner said. “But now the administration is claiming that similar allegations justify the use of military force against other sovereign states. It cannot credibly argue that it calls for invasion in the case of drug trafficking charges and grants amnesty in others.”
At a press conference on Saturday after Maduro’s capture, President Trump was pressed about the pardon. He said Hernandez had been “subjected to very unjust persecution.”
“I was treated the same way the Biden administration treated a man named Trump,” Trump said, noting that after leaving office after his first term in office, he was criminally charged with preserving classified documents and attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
President Trump also cited his support for Honduras’ next president, Nasri Asufura, as another reason for the pardon.
“Obviously the people liked what I did because he’s also a member of the party of the person who won,” Trump said. “And one of the reasons why that was done was due to the fact that the ruling party felt very strongly that the man was being treated very badly.”
President Trump also gestured to Rubio and other members of his national security team to explain why he pardoned them.
“I went to a lot of people who were standing behind me and they felt that this man was persecuted and treated very badly,” he said.
