A newly surfaced Justice Department memo is revealing a sharp break between the Trump administration’s private legal rationale for the series of deadly boat strikes in the Caribbean and the public explanation President Donald Trump has repeatedly offered.
According to sources familiar with a classified Office of Legal Counsel opinion, the administration has been framing the missile strikes against drug cartels as acts of collective self-defense on behalf of U.S. allies such as Mexico and Colombia, the Guardian reported Tuesday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the internal discussions.
The claim hinges on an unproven premise that drug cartels are waging armed violence against those governments using proceeds from multimillion-dollar cocaine shipments.
“As a result, according to the legal analysis, the strikes are targeting the cocaine, and the deaths of anyone on board should be treated as an enemy casualty or collateral damage if any civilians are killed, rather than murder,” the exclusive report stated.
But, as the Guardian noted Tuesday, the legal justification is a sweeping contrast with Trump’s stated reason for the 21 strikes that have already killed more than 80 people, which he has been portrayed by the MAGA leader as an effort to stop U.S. overdose deaths.
“A White House official responded that Trump has not been making a legal argument,” the report added. “Still, Trump’s remarks remain the only public reason for why the U.S. is firing missiles – when the legal justification is in fact very different.”
Critics say the new legal theory rests on shaky ground.
“A significant problem with this theory is that they still have not identified any state that’s engaged in an armed conflict with a particular cartel,” law professor Martin Lederman, a former deputy assistant attorney general at the OCL during the Obama and Biden administrations, told the Guardian.
“Nor has the administration provided any evidence that another state engaged in such an armed conflict has asked the U.S. to destroy cocaine shipments that are allegedly being used to subsidize armed violence against the requesting state,” he added.
The Pentagon has not commented on the report. It comes as the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, arrived in the Caribbean.
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