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Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of jailed Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, was released on Wednesday after serving nearly two years of a three-year prison sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering.

The 34-year-old Coronel was released from a halfway house in Long Beach, California, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The former beauty queen, who married the ruthless drug czar when she was a teenager, was sentenced to three years in prison by a US judge in November 2021.

Guzman was extradited from Mexico to the United States in 2017 and sentenced in July 2019 to life in prison.

During her trial, prosecutors and her defense lawyers said Coronel was not involved in the core business of Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, which shipped hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs into the United States.

“The defendant’s actual role was a minimal one,” prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi said.

“The defendant was not a leader, organizer, boss or other type of manager,” Nardozzi said. “Rather she was a cog in a very large wheel of a criminal organization.”

Coronel, who helped facilitate Guzman’s spectacular 2015 escape from a Mexican prison, regularly attended her husband’s trial in New York.

A dual US-Mexican citizen, Coronel was able to move in and out of the United States freely until she was arrested at Dulles International Airport outside Washington in February 2021.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was recently sentenced to more than two decades in prison for engaging in a seditious conspiracy against the United States government, believes that former President Donald Trump will pardon him should he get reelected next year.

CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane reports that Tarrio this week delivered that message to supporters via a jailhouse call to a vigil being held outside the prison where he has been incarcerated.

“Bring people to vote,” Tarrio told the crowd, according to MacFarlane. “President Trump gets re-elected in 2024, because that’s our number one hope for all of us to go free.”

Trump has flatly stated that he would pardon many of the people who violently stormed the United States Capitol building on January 6th, 2021, although he has said he would be reluctant to pardon rioters who engaged in particularly brutal violence against Capitol police officers.

Trump notoriously used his presidential pardon powers for the benefit of political allies during his one term in office, including on people who went to jail for crimes that they committed on his behalf, including former campaign manager Paul Manafort and right-wing operative Roger Stone.

A Fox News host asking a House Republican if he has any evidence President Joe Biden benefitted from his son Hunter’s business contracts got the brush off and was forced to remind the congressman “everybody” has seen a video he claimed no one is talking about.

That video is of then-Vice President Joe Biden talking about how he followed official U.S. foreign policy that was also supported by European nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), requiring the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, to be relieved of his duties over his record of not prosecuting corruption.

Republicans have turned the video’s implication on its head, wrongly insisting it is evidence of corruption and bribery of the now -President, and using it in their efforts to change public opinion and attack Biden.

“Shokin’s inaction prompted international calls for his ouster and ultimately resulted in his removal by Ukraine’s parliament,” USA Today reported in 2019. “Without pressure from Joe Biden, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations, Shokin would not have been fired, said Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder and executive director of the Anti Corruption Action Centre in Kiev.”

“At one point, Biden withheld $1 billion in aid to Ukraine to pressure the government to remove Shokin from the Prosecutor General’s Office,” the paper adds. “Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin’s ouster, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency set up in 2014 that has worked closely with the FBI.”

U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum that President Joe Biden “could be compromised.”

“Have you seen evidence,” MacCallum asked Smith, “that shows a link to money from these contracts that Hunter Biden had, that that money helped to support the lifestyle of President Biden? Have you seen that connection?”

Instead of answering the question, Congressman Smith said, “You know one thing people’s not talking about, what we have seen is his video statement in Ukraine, saying that they needed to remove the federal prosecutor that was investigating the Burismo which is the company that his son was sitting on the board getting paid over two million dollars to be sitting on it, and he brags about the gentleman being fired –” Smith said, wrongly naming Burisma.

Before he could finish MacCallum interjected, saying, “Yeah, everybody has seen that one,” referring to the video.

“That right there is enough in itself to say, something is not right,” Smith concluded.

“Alright, we will see where this goes. Representative Smith, thank you,” MacCallum said.

Former Lincoln Project executive director Fred Wellman called Smith’s remarks, “Complete bullshit.”

“Dozens of countries were pushing to get the deeply corrupt Shokin fired and the Republicans are now using him as a witness. That’s before we talk about all of that happened before he was President. These clowns have nothing.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Just months before the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, Julio Pacheco Yepes says he was arrested and tortured by police for belonging to a left-wing underground movement that opposed the regime.

Now, nearly five decades on, Pacheco Yepes is set — at a hearing that opens on Friday — to become the first victim of the Franco dictatorship to testify before a Spanish judge investigating allegations of torture.

“It could open a chink in the wall of impunity that we (victims) have had to suffer for so long,” the 67-year-old told AFP at his home in Vallecas, a working-class district of southeastern Madrid, referring to the people who suffered repression during Franco’s 1939-75 rule.

“It is an important milestone. Keep in mind that this all happened nearly 50 years ago. Until now, nobody, no judge, has accepted a lawsuit or heard testimony in court. This is a first.”

Over the years, around a hundred lawsuits have been filed over alleged torture suffered during the Franco era, but none of them was ever admitted, according to associations representing victims.

Judges have argued that the amnesty law passed in 1977 during Spain’s transition to democracy made it impossible to prosecute crimes committed by political opponents of the regime or those perpetrated by “civil servants and public order agents” such as police.

But many Franco-era victims such as Pacheco Yepes and his wife Rosa Maria Garcia Alcon — who was also arrested in 1975 — argue that torture is a crime against humanity which cannot be covered by an amnesty and the statute of limitations.

– ‘A pact of silence’ –

“What was imposed (in Spain) was a pact of silence and it has taken many years” to break it, said Garcia Alcon, 66, who heads La Comuna victims’ association.

In August 1975, Pacheco Yepes and Garcia Alcon — teenagers who were going out together at the time — were both arrested for their involvement in the Revolutionary Anti-Fascist and Patriot Front (FRAP), a left-wing student movement opposed to Franco.

They were taken to the police headquarters in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square, which was used as a lockup and torture centre during the dictatorship.

They say various officers tortured them there for days before jailing them for “terrorism”.

In December 1975, a month after Franco’s death, the pair were released on bail. Several months later they were pardoned.

In 2018, Garcia Alcon filed a lawsuit against one of the two police officers she says tortured her but it was not admitted by the courts.

She will also take the stand on Friday as a witness in the case brought by her husband.

She says one of the ways the police tortured him was to force him watch them hurting her.

– ‘Only truth can heal’ –

Pacheco Yepes filed his lawsuit against four of his alleged torturers in February, just months after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government passed the democratic memory law honoring the victims of violence and persecution under Franco.

The law was opposed by the right, which said it would only re-open the wounds of Spain’s past.

Pacheco Yepes said it was difficult to gather the documentation to support his case, given the “total” unwillingness of public bodies such as the National Archive to “cooperate”.

While he would like to see his alleged torturers “sitting in the dock”, if the judge ultimately decides not to put them on trial, it will still serve as an important reminder about “what Francoism was”, he says.

This is particularly important at a time when the far-right Vox party is gaining ground and there is “a strong current” of nostalgia about the Franco era, he says.

“The only way to fight this… is by showing how politically backwards (the Franco dictatorship) was,” he told AFP.

“The only way to close wounds is with the truth… If you don’t, they will always bleed.”