Mollie Hemingway told FBN’s Stuart “Varney & Co.” that President Obama’s recent comments about “rule of law” and the Republican Party are “reprehensible” coming from him.

“It’s almost reprehensible commentary from the man who led, who instigated the Russia collusion hoax, one of the most horrific things perpetrated on this country. He refused to accept his loss, so he orchestrated this entire effort to run a coup against the incoming president,” she said.

STUART VARNEY, FOX BUSINESS: New York Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman says he’s optimistic about his party taking back the majority in the House, and then he says he can lead multiple investigations of Trump and his Cabinet. Watch this.

REP. DAN GOLDMAN: What I’m optimistic about is, we take back the majority, and people like Jamie Raskin and I will be leading investigations into Trump’s corruption, into all of the Cabinet officials and this gross abuse of power. We will get to the bottom of a lot of it, and we will reveal it, and it will become transparent. I think part of what people seem to think is they give him a pass because he does it out in the open. There’s a lot he does not do in the open, and when that comes out, it is going to be very bad.

STUART VARNEY: Okay. Investigate, investigate, and then impeach. Is that what the country wants, Mollie?

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY, THE FEDERALIST: I think it’s what Democrats want.

This is a guy who supported the Russian collusion hoax, and he wants a reason for Democrats to show up in the midterms.

I would say Republican members of Congress need to give their voters — particularly the members of the Republican Senate who don’t seem to be doing that much — they need to give a reason for their voters to show up in the midterms, or else all you’re going to see is impeachment proceedings and similar investigation-type efforts.

STUART VARNEY: I can’t see that being popular with the country — regardless of whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Does this country want a whole bunch of investigations and maybe impeachment? I just don’t think the country wants it.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: I certainly don’t think a lot of the country wants it, but those people who are going to show up in the primaries do, and the Republicans need to take it seriously.

You’ve seen it in previous elections. They’re not showing up to vote at the same level that some of the more Trump-deranged Democratic voters are.

STUART VARNEY: I love that phrase, Trump-deranged.

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I’m saying that I’d love a Republican Party that believed in the rule of law.

I’d love a Republican Party that is conservative in some ways, that didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff, but believed in rule of law and judicial independence and empirical evidence in science, and wasn’t constantly tapping into our worst impulses.

There has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return.

STUART VARNEY: Oh, my. What do you say to that? A bit rich, isn’t it?

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: It’s almost reprehensible commentary from the man who led, who instigated the Russia collusion hoax, one of the most horrific things perpetrated on this country. He refused to accept his loss, so he orchestrated this entire effort to run a coup against the incoming president. It caused so much trouble, so many people were put in prison, and it was all based on something that he knew was a lie.

I’m glad that a wide variety of voices has condemned this lying from this former president. He did so much to destroy rule of law.

Holding people accountable for what they did to the country is not lawfare. It’s simply justice. People of all types need to speak out against what he did and how much he destroyed the FBI, the DOJ, our intelligence agencies, and our whole conception of accepting elections when you lose.

I know he’s sad that his party lost in 2016, but that’s no excuse for the real destruction he wrought on the country.

By Tim Hains for Real Clear Politics

In this case, the truth was inconvenient to the prosecution.

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument for Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Part 2 examined the case the Biden Department of Justice put on.

Part 3 examined how the prosecutors lied to get the trial in front of a biased judge and an uninformed jury.

This is Part 4.

The more one examines it, the more obvious it becomes that Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez not only because it was in America’s geopolitical interest but also because it was in the interest of justice.

It will take many stories to explain how the US federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández was a show trial.

It appears to have been theatrically produced through a collaboration between Judge P. Kevin Castel and the Biden DOJ to ensure that a Manhattan jury convicted Hernandez.

Nine Ledgers

The government’s case relied on drug ledgers seized in an investigation of Honduran traffickers. A drug ledger is a handwritten notebook that records amounts, names, and payment dates.

There were nine ledgers seized by Honduran police in June 2018 from Honduran trafficker Magdaleno Meza. Meza was murdered in October 2019 at a Honduran maximum-security prison. The man who possessed the notebooks could not testify. The prosecution provided the interpretation of his ledgers.

Two of Meza’s nine ledgers contained the entry “La JOH.”

La is the feminine article in Spanish. It would naturally refer to a woman or to a business — not to a man. But the government told the jury La JOH was a reference to Juan Orlando Hernández.

The defense wanted the jury to see all nine ledgers because in the other seven ledgers, there were entries showing that JOH did not mean Juan Orlando Hernández.

The SDNY prosecutors, of course, objected and asked the judge to suppress the seven ledgers.

They had good reason.

What the Other Ledgers Showed

One of the suppressed ledgers recorded payments to JOH under entries that read: “payment to JOH for fumigation.” And: payment to JOH for weeding and cleaning of River.

JOH appears to be a business that performed agricultural work. A fumigation company. Not a person. Not the former president of Honduras.

Juan Orlando Hernández was not a fumigation contractor.

The compliant Judge P. Kevin Castel, of course, sustained the objection. The jury never got to see the evidence that the JOH entries in a dead drug dealers ledgers did not refer to Hernandez.

Radar That Did Not Exist

Three cooperators — Alexander Ardón, Luis Pérez, and Fabio Lobo — testified that Hernández provided them with radar information to help their drug shipments evade detection when they were active drug traffickers.

Pérez fled Honduras in 2014. Lobo was arrested in 2015. Ardón was referring to his years as mayor of El Paraíso, which ended in 2013.

The kind of information the cooperators described was when and where Honduran detection systems tracked aircraft. Where the radar coverage gaps were on a given day. When the system was active and when it was not. This intelligence would permit a trafficker to schedule a cocaine flight when no radar would see it land.

The defense called Xavier Rene Barrientos, the former head of the Honduran Air Force. Barrientos testified that no radar existed in Honduras until after 2015.

The cooperators were unable, on cross-examination, to specify what radar information they had received.

The radar testimony was the prosecution’s evidence that Hernández did not merely benefit from drug trafficking but was feeding traffickers government intelligence in real time.

Three federal cooperators testified that Hernandez gave them radar information from a system that did not exist during the years they described.

The U.S. State Department’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Reports during these years confirm this. The State Department repeatedly noted that Honduras lacked detection radar capabilities, which was why Honduran airspace was used so heavily as a cocaine-trafficking route.

The Hernández prosecution was led by United States Attorney Damian Williams’s office in the Southern District of New York. The four trial prosecutors were Assistant United States Attorneys Jacob Gutwillig, David Robles, Elinor Tarlow, and Kyle Wirshba.

The Prosecutors Coached the Lie

Three drug traffickers — three men facing the rest of their lives in federal prison unless they told the story the prosecution wanted to hear — did not invent the same story independently.

Federal cooperators meet with prosecutors and DEA agents. They tell their version. The prosecutors guide them. They tell it again. The version that ends up before a jury is the one the prosecutors coached.

The prosecutors must have known the radar story was a lie. But it was more than that. The prosecutors almost certainly came up with the story. The State Department had been publishing the truth for years. Every annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report documented that Honduras lacked radar for detection.

The prosecutors put three witnesses on the stand to tell a story they knew was not true. The federal criminal code calls it subornation of perjury. 18 U.S.C. § 1622.

The Irony

There is a little irony that should not be overlooked. Hernández was the president who got radar installed. The U.S. Southern Command credited him for it. General John Kelly told the U.S. Senate that under Hernández, drug-trafficking flights into Honduran airspace had been almost stopped.

The man the cooperators said was helping cartels evade detection was the man who built the detection.

The Pattern

The seven ledgers the jury did not see. The radar that did not exist. Small things, maybe.

But still, the rules of evidence exist because the truth is often unwelcome to one side or the other in every trial. In this case, the truth was inconvenient to the prosecution.

We will present many more examples of inconvenient truths in this series.

By Frank Parlato for Art Voice – https://artvoice.com/2026/05/05/the-show-trial-of-juan-orlando-hernandez-part-4-the-prosecutors-coached-the-lie/

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument for Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Part 2 examined the case the Biden Department of Justice put on.

Part 3 is about how the prosecutors got a biased judge and an uninformed jury. The legal name for what they did is forum shopping.

Hernández was tried in the Southern District of New York. The prosecutors alleged his criminal conduct happened in Honduras, Mexico, and other countries. None of it happened in Manhattan.

For crimes committed outside the United States, Congress wrote Title 18, United States Code, Section 3238. The venue lies in the district where the offender is first brought into the country. 

Hernández was extradited from Honduras on April 21, 2022. His point of entry into the United States was Florida.

The case could properly have been tried in Florida. The Southern District of New York, then headed by United States Attorney Damian Williams, chose Manhattan instead.

Why does it matter whether it was Miami or Manhattan? Both are American cities. The reason is pretty obvious to anyone without their rose colored justice glasses on.

SDNY judges, including Judge Kevin Castel, who tried the case, are mostly former SDNY prosecutors. Castel was an Assistant United States Attorney in the office before he was a judge.

Florida federal judges, on the other hand, come from diverse backgrounds, including defense lawyers, civil practitioners, and state court judges. Federal judges in Florida — including judges of Cuban and Venezuelan heritage — would have known of Hernandez and might have been inclined to give him a fair trial.

The Biden DOJ knew it would more likely get a pro-prosecution judge in Manhattan.

The second reason is the jury.

A South Florida jury might have included Cuban refugees, Venezuelan exiles, and Honduran emigrants. A South Florida jury would have known what happens to former presidents in Latin America when their political opponents take power, and might have asked questions in deliberation that a Manhattan jury was less likely to ask.

The DOJ may have wanted Manhattan because a jury there was more likely to accept the prosecution’s word about what kind of country Honduras was and what kind of man Hernández was.

The Stipulation

The Southern District of New York did not present records of Hernandez’s arrival in Florida to the jury. That might have ended the trial in Manhattan.

The defense agreed to a stipulation, drafted and presented by the Department of Justice, stating that Hernández had been first brought to New York. The first point of entry was Florida.

The stipulation was read to the jury. The jury believed it.

A reader may ask why Hernández did not correct the record. Three reasons.

First, American federal venue rules — the rule that says a defendant first brought into the United States in Florida should be tried in Florida — are not concepts a foreign defendant tracks.

Second, Judge Castel had ordered that Hernandez review certain pretrial materials only in the presence of retained counsel. His retained counsel was sick. The visits stopped.

Third, the stipulation system in federal practice works through the lawyers. A stipulation is a document drafted by the prosecution and reviewed by the defense. The defendant typically never sees it before it is signed. He sees it when it is read aloud at trial. By then, the agreement will have already been made.

The system functions because federal prosecutors are presumed to be honest with defense lawyers about basic facts. A defense lawyer assumes that when the United States Attorney’s Office tells him the defendant was first brought to New York, the United States Attorney’s Office is not making it up.

Judge Castel instructed the jury on the venue element of the charges based on the stipulation that Hernandez first landed in Manhattan rather than in Florida.

The defense’s appeal papers state that the prosecution later conceded the venue stipulation read to the jury was false.

What That Means in Plain English

If a defense lawyer did that to a federal prosecutor — drafted a stipulation containing a false fact, induced the prosecutor to sign it, used it to obtain a verdict — the defense lawyer would be disbarred. There might be a criminal prosecution for obstruction of justice.

When the Department of Justice does it, the trial is held in prosecution-friendly Manhattan and not Miami.

Judge P. Kevin Castel, presented with a post-trial admission by the prosecution that he had instructed the jury on a false fact regarding a constitutional element of the case, could have ordered briefing, set aside the conviction, or ordered a new trial in the proper district.

He sentenced Hernández to 45 years.

Part 4 on the show trial of Juan Orlando Hernandez is coming next.

By Frank Parlato for Art Voice – https://artvoice.com/2026/05/04/part-3-the-framing-of-honduran-president-juan-orlando-hernandez-by-bidens-doj/