Trump administration turned to Pentagon after CIA lawyers nixed drug boat attacks: report

Donald Trump and adviser Stephen Miller’s grand plan to ramp up the war on drugs by blowing up alleged “narcoterrorists” in attacks from above did not pass legal muster with the lawyers at the CIA.

So they ran to a more compliant Pentagon.

According to a report from the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Horton, Donald Trump’s CIA director John Ratcliffe busily began planning the attacks via a variety of methods but then butted heads with lawyers in his department who questioned the legality of the unprovoked killing of foreign citizens.

The Post is reporting, “... early on, according to two people familiar with the matter, the administration proposed having the CIA use its unique covert authorities to conduct the lethal strikes on drug traffickers that Trump and Stephen Miller, his powerful homeland security adviser, wanted,” however, “Lawyers at the spy agency and elsewhere in the government were skeptical. Was killing civilian drug traffickers defensible under domestic law, they asked, if the cartels do not actually seek to attack Americans, even if the product they smuggle might lead to deaths in the United States?”

According to one official who wished to remain anonymous, “There is no actual threat justifying self defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.”

The report notes that Trump and Miller faced “pushback” from CIA attorneys forcing them to revisit a back-up plan using the Pentagon, headed by former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, with Post adding the caveat, “And it came up with a legal justification that national security law experts inside and out of government have said does not stand up to facts: that the country was in a ‘non-international’ armed conflict with ‘designated terrorist organizations.’.”

“In the ongoing mission the Pentagon recently dubbed Operation Southern Spear, U.S. military forces have killed more than 80 people in 21 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific,” after Trump gave the go-ahead with the Post reporting, “The details of the finding that Trump signed in October are classified. But several people familiar with it have said it is broadly scoped, aggressive and aimed at countering transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force.”

“Many of the lawyers and other career officials at the White House National Security Council, Pentagon and Justice Department who had over the preceding months raised concerns about using lethal force against narcotraffickers had either left government or were reassigned or removed,” the Post is reporting.

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