LETTER: Trump pardoning drug dealers

For those of you who may think President Donald Trump is altruistic in his battles against drug trafficking, think again. His ruse of going after Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro for heading up his own trafficking ring is just that — disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst.

His pardon last week of a convicted drug dealer, Honduras’s ex-president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was so egregious as to be unbelievable. Hernandez was convicted in a New York court of drug trafficking and firearms offenses and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was found guilty of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the likes of El Chapo Guzman to protect shipments of cocaine passing through Honduras on the way to United States. This went on for two decades.

There is no proof that Maduro has any such dealings. It’s a charade meant as cover for a more insidious plot of regime change. The problem is we have an abysmal record of being stuck in quagmire after quagmire, ultimately leaving defeated with the countries in worse shape than before we converged on them.

How is Mr. Trump’s duplicity justified? And how are the other pardons of felons justified? The duplicity is glaring and troubling.