A Honduran court has thrown out the last corruption case against former President Juan Orlando Hernández, closing the final chapter of legal jeopardy for a leader who walked out of a U.S. federal prison after President Donald Trump commuted his 45-year drug-trafficking sentence.

Judicial officials said Tuesday that a Tegucigalpa court dismissed fraud and money-laundering charges tied to the so-called "Pandora II" scandal, in which prosecutors alleged Hernández and allies diverted nearly $11 million in state funds into political campaigns between 2010 and 2013 — including his own first run for the presidency. According to Al Jazeera's report on the ruling, the judge concluded there was no evidence the embezzled money had actually reached Hernández's 2013 campaign accounts, and that he was not responsible for the budgetary decisions in question at the time.

"This chapter of political persecution has now ended," Hernández said of the dismissal.

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Hernández, who governed Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the United States in 2022 and convicted in a Manhattan federal courtroom two years later on charges he took bribes from traffickers to help move roughly 400 tons of cocaine toward American shores. He was sentenced to 45 years. Trump pardoned him in December 2025, asserting without offering evidence that the prosecution had been a political "setup," and Hernández returned to Honduras in July after the pardon freed him.

Tuesday's ruling did not just clear Hernández. Reuters reported that charges were simultaneously dropped against former President Porfirio Lobo and Hernández's ex-finance minister, Wilfredo Cerrato, both of whom had faced related Pandora II allegations.

The dismissal lands against a charged political backdrop. Trump had publicly warned he would cut U.S. funding to Honduras if the presidential candidate from Hernández's National Party did not win this year's election; that candidate, Nasry Asfura, went on to win. Critics of the ruling, according to Al Jazeera, argue the case's collapse — coming so soon after a foreign pardon and an election shaped by U.S. pressure — raises fresh questions about the independence of Honduras's courts.

For now, Hernández walks away from Honduran justice system entirely clean on paper, just as he did from the American one — a reversal that, less than a year ago, would have seemed unthinkable to the prosecutors who spent years building the case against him.