New reporting suggests that Judge Emil Bove, a former member of President Donald Trump’s legal team, spoke in favor of murdering people aboard alleged drug boats without proving they had done anything wrong.
While serving as acting deputy attorney general after Trump took office, Bove told the federal government’s top drug prosecutors that the administration was no longer interested in intercepting boats carrying narcotics, multiple sources told NPR.
Since that time, the U.S. military has killed more than 75 people in boat strikes without providing any direct evidence to support the claim that they posed a threat to Americans.
During his February address to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), Bove reportedly shocked attendees when he said the new policy should be to “just sink the boats.”
“He said that we’re not going to worry so much about interdictions, we’re just going to sink the boats,” one person who attended the conference confirmed.
“I looked around at others in that room when he said that, and jaws literally dropped,” the person added. “The way people interpreted that was not, ‘We’re going to interdict and process the folks in the boats.’ People took that as, ‘We’re just going to blow up the boats with people in them.’”
One former DOJ official who was present for the speech did not take Bove’s remarks seriously.
“It seemed so outlandish,” the former official said. “It just didn’t seem reasonable until they started blowing boats up, and then holy s—-, does this all go together?”
“Now that you look back on it, I think you can infer he probably meant just sink the boats with the people on them.”
Although the administration has not provided any evidence that narcotics were on boats that were struck by the U.S. military, DOJ lawyers provided select members of Congress with a memo with a legal rationale for the use of force.
According to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, officials had declined to seek additional war powers from Congress “because the administration has determined they don’t apply, since the American personnel conducting the strikes aren’t in danger,” NPR reported.
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