Drug lord hypocrisy
Makes no sense to bomb suspected drug boats and pardon a narco-terrorist
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Some conservatives are tripping over themselves to explain how President Donald Trump can kill people in international waters based on suspicions of drug trafficking while also pardoning one of the world’s most notorious narco-terrorists.
Count Oklahoma’s U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin among that group.
Congressional Republicans are going to face a choice. Think of the Republicans during the days of President Richard Nixon when they confronted the president when it was obvious he had broken the law. They forced him to step down for the good of the party and country, showing independence and integrity. That’s a contrast to the Democrats during President Bill Clinton’s era when excusing his lies about his personal bad behavior.
The stakes are much higher than a politically motivated break-in and affair. Now, the country faces the possibility of human rights and/or war crimes.
The American rule of law has always been about due process. Historically, crime fighting and public policy have sought rooting out the crime bosses by getting low-level criminals to give up information.
These principles are being violated with the ongoing boat bombings in the Caribbean and East Pacific, leading to bipartisan congressional investigations to determine whether illegal orders have been made.
Those inquiries are just beginning, but Mullin has already staked a position favor of Trump, as he stated over the weekend on CNN’s “State of the Union” show with host Dana Bash.
“These individuals don’t care about the lives of our friends and families,” Mullin said. “Why do we care if we take them out in international water?”
First, the victims of the bombings haven’t been convicted. There hasn’t been due process, and the strikes happen without provocation. Second, this breaks protocol of drug interdiction. That is when arrests are made to gather information for investigations into drug rings. Interdiction is about prosecution, not death orders, to bust cartels from the top.
More than 80 people have been killed by these American strikes since early September. Congress did not approve these attacks, but Trump says it’s within his authority.
The Washington Post reported that a bombing on Sept. 2 left some survivors, until Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a verbal order to kill suspected drug-trafficking survivors. Based on that, a commanding officer issued orders for a second strike to kill those remaining.
Investigations have been launched by the House and Senate. The House Armed Services Committee is led by Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama and the Senate Armed Services Committee is headed by Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker. Both have directed inquiries into the Defense Department.
U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio and former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS that if the Sept. 2 report is true, “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.”
Here’s what doesn’t make sense: Trump is poised to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted and sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for assisting drug traffickers in moving hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S. The case remains an appalling example of government corruption.
He was found guilty of colluding with narco-terrorists between 2004 and 2022. Prosecutors proved he assisted “drug traffickers and cartel leaders by alerting them to possible interdictions, and sanctioning heavily armed violence to support their drug trade.”
The Justice Department’s details of the case is worth a read. The former Honduran president worked with notorious drug lords such as El Chapo and once bragged he was going to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” His presidential term was rife with allegations of embezzlement and corruption, leading to ongoing protests. His brother was arrested in 2017 in Florida by Drug Enforcement Administration agents for drug trafficking, using Honduran military to transport cocaine into the U.S. on behalf of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.
How can Trump order deaths of suspected low-level drug runners but embrace a double-dealing, corrupt politician-turned drug lord convicted in a U.S. court for flooding our country with an illegal narcotic?
It’s hypocritical.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “according to many people that I greatly respect,” Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly.” That’s not a full explanation.
An interesting aspect of Hernández was his religious heavy-handedness while in office, giving power of government decision-making to evangelical Christians and the Catholic Opus Dei group. He mandated daily prayer in schools, military and police institutions. He added bans on abortion and same-sex marriage in his nation’s constitution.
Mullin told Bash that he wasn’t part of the pardon conversation but “I believe there is probably a good faith that is being stretched forth here.” He predictably took a shot at former President Joe Biden saying Trump is “a lot better than the Biden administration.”
Mullin said he trusts Trump’s “natural reaction” and approach to foreign affairs because it “has been very, very effective.” He also repeated the White House talking point that Trump has ended eight wars. That claim is an exaggeration, considering two of those “wars” (Serbia/Kosovo and Egypt/Ethiopia) were actually not at war.
Mullin claims that “what the president is doing is always calculated.”
Perhaps. But, no matter the calculation, Trump is freeing one of the world’s highest placed narco-terrorists that took years for American law enforcement to bring down. That prosecution was a delicate balance considering Hernández had a good relationship with the U.S. during the President Barack Obama and Trump administrations.
On Tuesday, the White House confirmed there was a second order to strike on the suspected drug boats on Sept. 2, contrary to a denial made earlier by Hegseth, who called the Washington Post story “fake news.” Trump said he wouldn’t have ordered the second strike. Mullin may have come to Trump administration defense a little too fast. The rest of the Oklahoma delegation has refrained from commenting, a wise decision until more facts are uncovered by their colleagues.
If the congressional investigations find wrongdoing, I hope the Republicans will act like they did in 1974 and not the Democrats of the mid-1990s.
Ginnie. Thanks for your writing. You are among the few journalists in Oklahoma that tackles these issues. You can place the morality of the Oklahoma Delegation on a pinhead. None of them is willing to risk their political status. But they sure like to espouse their “faith” principles on selective issues like women’s reproductive rights, trans health, immigrant rights.
I appreciate your perspective. I wrote Lankford regarding my concern about these murders on the high seas. No response.