Crime Novella With A Crazy Ending — Pardon! December 29, 2025December 27, 2025 Erasing the Verdict: The Ongoing Shock of Trump’s Cocaine Kingpin Pardon Yikes!!!!! Of the pardoned former Honduran president’s brother, Tony: Just eight days after [Lopez] helped convict Tony Hernández, a surveillance camera on the wall of the prison captured the following scene: López, in a white T-shirt and black shorts, was talking with the prison warden and a guard in a hallway. As they chatted, another guard wearing a black mask approached a side door with a key and opened it. The guard stepped aside to let six men burst into the hall. One pointed a submachine pistol at López and quickly fired at least a half-dozen shots at close range. As the trafficker lay facedown on the floor, clearly dead, the gunman fired what appears to be at least 20 more shots at López’s lifeless corpse, most of them in his head, painting the white cinderblock wall red. Another of the men dropped to the floor and began stabbing his corpse with a machete-like knife. Finally, the man began to saw at the bottoms of López’s legs, as if trying to remove them. The story reads like a novella. The absolute least of it: [Former President Hernandez] continued to court Trump’s favor even after his brother’s guilty verdict. The following spring, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Food & Drug Administration publicly rebuked Trump’s claim that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial medicine, could effectively treat the virus. Hernández seized an opportunity. “Well, I never spoke to a scientist,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “but I will tell you this: I did speak with the president of Honduras, just a little while ago. I didn’t bring it up—he brought it up. He said they use the hydroxychloroquine, and he said the results are just so incredible, with the hydroxychloroquine. Check with him. Call him. The president of Honduras. A really nice guy.” As to the pardon (in tiny part): Although the investigations into Hernández, as well as the conviction of his brother, happened under the first Trump administration, the family and their backers leaned into the idea that his prosecution was a Biden-Harris conspiracy. In June, Roger Stone on his podcast interviewed Shane Trejo, a conservative activist and leader of the Third Term Project, which aims to extend Trump’s presidency beyond the constitutional limit. A pardon, they agreed, could be a political masterstroke that could tank the political influence of Hernández’s leftist successor and delegitimize her entire party. So much more to it, if you like crime novels. Just totally yikes.