The Implications Are Vast and Serious
The explosive holiday story from the WaPo — that on orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military deliberately killed survivors of one of the Trump administration’s lawless high seas attacks on alleged drug smugglers — may have finally stirred Republicans in Congress to at least pantomime as Article I legislators.
From a legal standpoint, it’s important to reiterate the baseline: There is no basis in law for the maritime attacks. Period. Full stop.
The Trump administration has come up with a pretextual justification for the campaign of attacks that remains mostly secret, but what has been reported shows it to be weak, unconvincing, ahistorical, and self-justifying.
While the scene depicted in the WaPo report is grim and disturbing, the primary legal significance of the Sept. 2 incident is that it would be a violation of the laws of war even under the administration’s own self-justifying description of its campaign as an armed conflict with “narcoterrorists.”
Hegseth’s reported order “to kill everybody” was issued before the SEAL Team 6 attack, and the survivors were killed when a Special Operations commander ordered a second strike on the disabled vessel, according to the WaPo report.
In a remarkable rhetorical retreat — at least for now — President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One last evening that he would not have wanted the second strike: “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine.”
Trump also said he had “great confidence” Hegseth did not give a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard the vessel, saying that Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100%.”
In short, the president and defense secretary are denying that they’re responsible for the kill order as described by the WaPo. Assuming the WaPo story to be accurate, the implication of their position is that service members on the ground exceeded their orders or otherwise failed to follow the rules of engagement. The fact that that’s the best the White House and Pentagon can come up with at this stage of the unfolding scandal is a good indicator of how bad the actual facts are.
In a significant move that it is wildly out of character so far this term, key Hill Republicans gave public, on-the-record voice to their concerns about the WaPo story. “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act,” former House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH) told CBS News.
The armed services committees in both chambers launched bipartisan investigations into the reported attack.
When we adjourned for the Thanksgiving holiday, the Trump White House and the Pentagon were leading a retaliatory campaign against Hill Democrats — accusing them of treason and raising the prospect of executing them — for posting a video urging service members to do their duty and abide by the law by refusing to follow illegal orders. By the time we returned from the holiday, the script had completely flipped, and Hill Republicans were struggling to defend the administration’s lawless conduct in the strikes.
In Other Venezuela News …
- In most cases, the Trump administration does not know the identities of the more than 80 people killed in its high sea strikes on allege drug-smuggling boats, the NYT reports.
- In a social media post Saturday, President Trump unilaterally declared that Venezuelan airspace should be considered closed: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
- President Trump spoke by phone with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the week before last.
Boasberg Wants Noem on the Record
In the contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg set a Dec. 5 deadline for the Trump administration to submit declarations “from all individuals involved in the decision not to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. physical custody on March 15 and 16, 2025.”
In ordering the declarations, Boasberg highlighted the administration’s filing earlier in the week claiming to identify the most senior official involved in defying Boasberg’s order to halt the AEA deportations of Venezuelan nationals: “The Government, now for the first time, has identified who purportedly made the decision not to recall planes containing Alien Enemies Act detainees on March 15, 2025: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.”
Note Boasberg’s use of “purportedly.”
As Morning Memo observed last week: “The AEA deportations were one of the White House’s first major moves in its mass deportation scheme, the signature initiative of President Trump’s second term. But we’re supposed to believe that the buck stopped with … Kristi Noem.”
Must Read
Sarah Stillman investigates the Trump administration’s brutal third country removals:
One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone.
Trump Lashes Out After Guardsmen Shot
President Trump reacted to the brutal shooting death in D.C. of one member of the West Virginia National Guard and the wounding of another by an Afghan refugee with a predictable scorched earth attack on migrants of color:
- Trump vowed to halt migration from “third world countries.”
- The Trump administration paused all asylum applications and stopped issuing visas to people from Afghanistan.
- Trump targeted the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota for an especially virulent social media post.
For the Record …
Fani Willis’ self-appointed replacement as prosecutor of the sprawling Georgia RICO case against Donald Trump and others for their role in trying to subvert the state’s 2020 election dropped the case, and the judge dismissed it.
Tina Peters to Remain in Colorado Custody
Under pressure from the Trump administration, Colorado has declined to transfer convicted former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters to federal custody. Peters has become a darling of U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin and the MAGA right after her conviction for tampering with voting machines to try to prove the 2020 Big Lie.
11th Circuit Upholds Sanctions Against Trump
A unanimous three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a $1 million sanction against President Trump and attorney Alina Habba for filing a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.
The Scale of Trump’s Retribution
- In the most comprehensive accounting yet of Trump’s campaign of payback, Reuters finds: “At least 470 people, organizations and institutions have been targeted for retribution since Trump took office – an average of more than one a day. Some were singled out for punishment; others swept up in broader purges of perceived enemies.”
- In conscripting the Pentagon for use in Trump’s retribution campaign, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has crossed a dangerous line that could lead to the politicization of the military. “The best way to stop a politicization death spiral is to never start it,” Peter Feaver, who studies civil-military relations at Duke University, told the WaPo.
The Corruption: Pardon Edition
- President Trump said he plans to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is serving a 45-year sentence after he was convicted last year of helping drug cartels ship hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes.
- President Trump commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, who had served just two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in a $1.6 billion fraud scheme.
The Destruction: Higher Ed Edition
In another major capitulation, Northwestern University reached a $75 million deal with the Trump administrations to restore frozen federal research funding.
Quote of the Day, Part I
New Yorker writer Dhruv Khullar, a physician:
A reason that the U.S. became the world’s biomedical leader—indeed, a reason that it emerged from the Cold War victorious—is that democratic governance allows for a level of self-correction that authoritarianism does not. Bad ideas can be beaten back at the ballot box, in the public square, and through the halls of Congress. The country is under no obligation to tolerate institutionalized quackery or elected officials who, through feckless appeals and half measures, have become complicit in it. Truly making America healthy will involve more than removing an asterisk. It will require turning the page.
Quote of the Day, Part II
Paul Offit, a pediatrician and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, on how to restore civic trust in science: “I don’t think there is any way to regain that trust other than have the viruses do the education, and the bacteria do the education, and then people will realize they paid way too high a cost.”
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
