'Congress kept in the dark': Bombshell report reveals covert operation greenlit by Trump

President Donald Trump “may have violated the law” according to a bombshell report Thursday that revealed the president had personally greenlit a covert military operation targeting North Korea.

According to two dozen government officials and military personnel who spoke with the New York Times, Trump had signed off in 2019 on an operation to deploy SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron – the same unit that carried out the 2011 assassination of Osama Bin Laden – to the shores of North Korea to plant an electronic device to intercept the communications of its Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

The operation was ultimately a failure, with the operation being compromised by a small boat approaching the team’s mini-subs. The team ended up firing upon and killing the boat’s two to three passengers, later learned to likely be civilians that had been “diving for shellfish,” according to New York Times reporters Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole, who spoke with the officials under the condition of anonymity.

And, while the team’s actions likely constituted a violation of international law – both by the violation of North Korea’s sovereignty by crossing into its borders, and the extrajudicial execution of civilians – Trump’s signing off on the operation may itself have violated the law as well.

“The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission,” the report reads. “The lack of notification may have violated the law. The White House declined to comment.”

The operation took place amid Trump’s attempts to broker peace with the East Asian nation, a long-time adversary to the United States, in large part for rejecting American influence and instead cozying up to the Soviet Union. In June of that year, Trump became the first United States president to set foot in North Korea in what was a widely-covered spectacle at the time.

As to Trump’s criminal culpability for greenlighting the operation, Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia University, told the New York Times that while some gray area existed for presidents to order covert operations without notifying Congress, in this instance, it was more likely than not that Trump’s decision ran afoul of standard protocol.

“The point is to ensure that Congress isn’t kept in the dark when major stuff is going on,” Waxman said. “This is exactly the kind of thing that would normally be briefed to the committees and something the committees would expect to be told about.”