It was a crucial moment in a high-stakes trial, and the federal prosecutor was fast on his feet. The defendant, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, stood accused of helping ship more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. Hernandez had been indicted in American courts on drug-trafficking and firearms charges and then extradited to the US. Now he was on a witness stand in New York City professing his innocence. “Narco traffickers do not have a party,” Hernandez said. “They support all of them. Or at least they try.”
“Including you, right?” shot back Kyle Wirshba, an assistant US attorney handling the cross-examination.
No, Hernandez responded—he could not stand the drug dealers. “So your testimony is you were the only honest politician in Honduras, is that right?” Wirshba replied—drawing an objection from a defense lawyer, which was sustained by the judge.
But the prosecutor had made his point, plus many others. Three days later, on March 8, 2024, the jury convicted Hernandez. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison—though 17 months later, he was abruptly and bizarrely pardoned by President Donald Trump.
Wirshba has not commented on the sudden reversal. But the attorney now finds himself at the center of another Trump criminal-justice storm. Last week, Wirshba led the prosecution team as Nicolás Maduro, the former president of Venezuela—freshly seized by American Delta Force commandos and flown north—was arraigned on charges that he’d helped ship tons of illicit drugs into the United States.
Maduro, like Hernandez before him, pleaded not guilty. That he will be tried in the Southern District of New York greatly compounds his troubles—probably.
The SDNY has long been known as the “sovereign district” of New York, in part because of the elite lawyers on its staff; Wirshba’s eight years of valuable experience, including his work on complex international cases, is only one example. The SDNY has won convictions for international figures from Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Egyptian “blind sheikh” who received a life sentence for plotting to blow up American landmarks, to Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as “the merchant of death.”
But the “sovereign district” nickname is also a reflection of the SDNY’s historical, prideful independence from so-called Main Justice in Washington. “Typically, SDNY’s view would be, ‘Get the hell out of here, DC. We’re going to run this thing. It’s our courthouse; our lawyers know the judges,’” says Elie Honig, who spent more than eight years as an assistant US attorney in the office and is now CNN’s senior legal analyst.
Yet things are a long way from typical these days, both politically and legally. Last year, Trump’s lieutenants forced the dismissal of an SDNY corruption case against New York City mayor Eric Adams, provoking the resignations of at least 10 lawyers from the Justice Department—including the SDNY’s then leader, Danielle Sassoon. More recently, DOJ summarily fired Maurene Comey, an accomplished SDNY prosecutor who just happens to be the daughter of Trump’s nemesis James Comey, the former FBI director. The office is now overseen by Jay Clayton, a Trump appointee who had never before worked as a prosecutor.
On the bright side, the SDNY doesn’t seem to have suffered as much attrition as other parts of the DOJ. “The job market is such that you don’t leave unless you really have to right now,” an SDNY insider says.
Still, the office has been roiled more than most by the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein mess; 125 out of its approximately 200 assistant US attorneys are currently assigned to review millions of pages of Epstein-related files. “There are a ton of people on Epstein,” the SDNY insider says, “which makes everything hard.”
Chris Smith
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