Democratic lawmakers criticized the Trump administration on Thursday for failing to share details of its targeting plans against purported drug traffickers or the legal arguments for destroying what it claims are smuggling boats.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s decision to exclude his party from a secret briefing on Wednesday about the campaign was “corrosive to our democracy.”
Frustration is growing among Democrats on Capitol Hill as the Trump administration refuses to provide a legal justification for attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The U.S. military strikes have killed at least 61 people since early September.
Visibly agitated, Mr. Warner said that the Republicans-only meeting was a violation of a law requiring bipartisan briefings of congressional leaders on national security matters.
“When an administration decides it can pick and choose which elected representatives get the understanding of their legal argument of why this is needed for military force and only chooses a particular party, it ignores all the checks and balances,” he said.
On other side of the Capitol, military legal experts had been scheduled to testify in a closed-door bipartisan briefing for the House. But the Trump administration decided not to send them.
“They didn’t even show up with the lawyers,” said Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, after the meeting.
He said that without the Defense Department’s legal advisers, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee were unable to obtain an explanation of the legal basis for the military strikes.
“They just said that they can’t answer these questions because the lawyers aren’t here,” he said.
A senior Trump administration official, discussing the strikes on the condition of anonymity, said the administration had been far more forthcoming on their legal rationale than the Obama administration had been when it conducted covert drone strikes against terrorist targets.
A White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said the Democratic complaints were “bogus” and an effort to distract from the government shutdown.
“The Department of War has held nine bipartisan briefings on narco-terrorist strikes, with additional bipartisan briefings scheduled, and individually works through requests from the Hill,” Ms. Kelly said.
The House briefing was led by Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett, a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Mr. Moulton said he gave him a lecture.
“The last word that I gave to the admiral is, ‘I hope you recognize the constitutional peril that you are in, and the peril you are putting our troops in,’” he said.
Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, said the Pentagon officials conceded that the administration did not know the identities of all of the individuals who were killed in the strikes.
“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes,” she said.
The Trump administration has designated a number of cartels as terrorist organizations and asserted that gives the military the power to target boats trafficking drugs, though experts have questioned that authority.
Ms. Jacobs said Pentagon officials said they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is “as much as three hops away from a known member” of a designated terrorist organization.
The people who have survived the strikes have been sent to other countries and released. None have been taken into American custody.
“Part of why they could not actually hold or try the individual that survived one of the attacks was because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden,” Ms. Jacobs said.
The Constitution vests the power to declare war and authorize military operations in Congress. But Republicans, who control both chambers, have not passed an authorization for the escalating campaign against the drug traffickers.
Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, has introduced legislation to reassert congressional oversight, but has been frustrated by the failure of the House to consider such measures.
“A large reason why this is happening is because Congress has for decades allowed it to happen,” Mr. Crow said. “It’s gotten out of control, and it’s time to fix it.”
Frustration is growing among Democrats and Republicans that the Trump administration has not provided the classified memo written by the Justice Department that lays out the legal argument for the strikes.
To address the concerns of Republicans, the Trump administration held the briefing on Wednesday for a dozen G.O.P. senators.
Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee, said the White House called him after he asked why the Wednesday briefing had not included Democrats.
“And I said, yep, because Intel and Armed Services, we do things on a bipartisan basis when it comes to this, we want to keep it that way,” he said.
Mr. Rounds said he hoped Democrats received the same information “because it was a very good briefing; it explained a lot of stuff.”
Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, who has raised some questions about the boat strikes, requested the briefing, according to congressional officials.
Mr. Warner said that he appreciated Mr. Rounds’s comments but that the Republican lawmakers should have walked out of the briefing.
The Trump administration, Mr. Warner said, needed to make the Justice Department’s memo and the target list available to all members of the Senate.
“If we allow this kind of foul to take place, what happens next time?” Mr. Warner said. “I shouldn’t be shocked. Only Republicans were called before the strike on Iran.”
Lawmakers asked Pentagon officials in the House briefing on Thursday to provide that legal memo, according to a U.S. official, who discussed the classified briefing on the condition of anonymity. But the Pentagon officials would not say when they would turn it over. The delay, the U.S. official added, was because the White House does not want to show members of Congress the memo.
Mr. Crow said the House briefing contained no discussion of the administration’s larger strategy, adding that the presentation had only deepened his concerns.
In an interview, Mr. Crow said the United States was “spending vast amounts of money” for very little.
“It looks as though the Trump administration has learned nothing from our last 20 years of war, and it’s going to end up giving us the same lackluster results,” he said.
Ms. Jacobs said House lawmakers pressed the Pentagon briefers for details about the drugs that were on the boats struck by the military.
President Trump has claimed, without evidence, the strikes had destroyed both cocaine and fentanyl, a far more deadly drug. But Colombia mostly produces only cocaine, which is trafficked through Venezuela, according to experts.
“They admitted that all of the narcotics coming out of this part of the world is cocaine,” Ms. Jacobs said. “They, you know, talked a little bit about the connection between cocaine and fentanyl, although I’m not convinced that what they said was accurate.”
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Robert Jimison covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on defense issues and foreign policy.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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