At least President Trump didn’t “kill all the lawyers” first, literally following Shakespeare’s words in “Henry VI, Part 2” on evading the rule of law. Instead, just a month into his second term in February, he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply fired the top lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force, known as judge advocates general, or JAGs.
“It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: You get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down,” Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks said at the time, according to the New York Times. She wasn’t alone in her fear, or her prescience.
Nine months later, the storylines embroiling Trump are getting all tangled up, creating a knotty mess of lawlessness, hypocrisy and potential war crimes in what conservative columnist George Will has dubbed “this moral slum of an administration.” And that owes at least in part to the fact that the president has gotten rid of good lawyers and other guardrails so he can act with impunity.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Americans got news of two utterly contradictory actions that grotesquely captured Trump’s amoral and immoral instincts — one involving killings, the other a presidential pardon.
First, the Washington Post disclosed a chilling twist on a Sept. 2 attack that was the first of 21 known U.S. military strikes so far on small boats allegedly hauling drugs, the opening of Trump’s undeclared war on so-called narco-terrorists. The commander for the operation, reportedly following Hegseth’s verbal order to “kill them all,” ordered a second strike when two of 11 men on board were seen alive, clinging to wreckage. At least 72 other humans have since been blown up on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
The nonprofit news site the Intercept had first reported the Sept. 2 episode just over a week later, but its report was little noted at the time. On Saturday, following the Post report and CNN’s confirmation, former military lawyers in a shadow watchdog group formed after the Pentagon purge in February released a five-page legal analysis stating that it “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” punishable by U.S. and international courts.
Prosecution could extend from Hegseth “down to the individual who pulled the trigger,” the Former JAGs Working Group said.
For all their tough-guy bravado, both Hegseth and Trump (definitely not a Trumanesque “the buck stops here” sort of president) have been trying mightily to distance themselves from the imbroglio, while each man insists the strikes were lawful. “I don’t know anything about it,” the commander in chief told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, returning from his holiday golf break. But, he added, “I wouldn’t have wanted … a second strike.”
The designated fall guy seems to be Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, who led the Joint Special Operations Command and ordered SEAL Team 6 to fire a second strike. Trump and Hegseth have repeatedly pointed to him, even as they insist they have his back. People at the Pentagon reportedly aren’t reassured.
Trump is using the controversy, meanwhile, to brag of his victories against drug traffickers, despite offering no public evidence that the dead men in those tiny boats were drug runners. Yet his boasts couldn’t be more dissonant with the weekend’s other Trump-related news: the president’s celebratory announcement on social media that he would pardon a proven, big-time drug-trafficker, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
Against Hernández there was heaps of evidence, enough to convict him in a U.S. federal court last year on charges of running his country as a narco-state, taking bribes and putting his police and military in league with drug cartels to funnel more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. To “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses,” he said, according to trial testimony.
Trump made good on the pardon this week — perhaps his greatest abuse of that presidential power in a long line of them, other than the Jan. 6 pardons. Hernández was freed on Tuesday from prison.
Why would Trump do it? Because he could. There is no one to stop him. Both as a matter of justice and politics, this pardon is all but inexplicable. Sometimes there’s just no explaining the madness of Trump as anything other than that.
Quizzed by reporters, Trump gave his go-to explanation for pardoning the undeserving: The case, like his own in past years, “was a Biden administration set-up.” Never mind that the investigation of Hernández began in Trump’s first term. Or that the federal judge in his trial was a Bush appointee, P. Kevin Castel, who went on at length before sentencing Hernández — to 45 years — about the justice of the case.
Then there’s the third storyline snarled in the one about Trump’s killings in international waters: his campaign against six Democratic lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, who made a video last month telling U.S. service members that they should not — must not — obey illegal orders. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” Trump thundered, though the Democrats were stating the law and military code. Hegseth, dutiful lapdog, directed the Navy to investigate one Democrat, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, for “serious allegations of misconduct.”
The alleged strike against survivors, on top of Trump’s general policy of lethal force against purported drug runners, underscores exactly why the Democrats spoke out. What’s more, they did so a month after Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of the U.S. Southern Command, announced his exit amid reports that he was forced out for objecting to the sea strikes.
Here’s the good news: Even senior Republicans in Congress have been roused to object. The public should act as well: to pull another “Epstein files” maneuver, creating so much pressure that Congress can’t back down from oversight hearings.
In other words: Bring in the lawyers.
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