Supreme Court Justice Scalia's ex-clerk latest to hammer Trump act:  'Very likely illegal'

President Donald Trump's military strikes on ships around South America have raised the ire of yet another prominent conservative legal expert.

Trump has spent the last several weeks bombing ships that the administration claims, with little public evidence, are carrying illegal narcotics to the United States, declaring the ships' crews to be international terrorists who pose an imminent threat to the United States — a massive departure from longstanding U.S. policy and international law that treats such people as suspected criminals who should be interdicted and arrested.

Tensions escalated this weekend after Colombian President Gustavo Petro accused U.S. troops of killing innocent fishermen — and Trump responded with threats to cut off aid to that country.

All of this is wildly illegal, wrote Ed Whelan, a conservative legal scholar who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

"The attack was very likely illegal even if the victim was a drug trafficker," wrote Whelan. "There are lawful ways of dealing with drug traffickers. Deliberately killing them without trial isn't one of them."

Whelan is far from anyone's idea of a disloyal Republican; he has fiercely defended the conservative movement's legal priorities and even had to apologize for smearing the sexual assault accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Nonetheless, in recent weeks he has raised alarms about Trump's increasing efforts to get around the law, also criticizing his legally suspect method of installing loyalist federal prosecutors.

Moreover, Whelan is not the only longtime right-wing legal strategist to condemn Trump's military strikes on suspected trafficking ships. Another is John Yoo, the George W. Bush administration Justice Department adviser who infamously wrote the memo justifying torture as an interrogation technique on foreign terrorism suspects.