What Else Is There to Know, Really?
As I was describing yesterday the Trump administration’s emerging line of defense to the unlawful strike on the survivors of the already-unlawful high seas attack, I came perilously close to falling into one of the traps of the Trump era.
Unlike political scandals of the past, where the drip, drip, drip of previously hidden facts eventually becomes an overwhelming torrent, Trump era scandals are right out in the open, not just admitted to but often bragged about. The smoking gun is bandied about like a trophy.
If investigators, especially reporters and editors, play by the old rules, they end up setting the bar impossibly high for themselves. The evidence of bad acts is right there in front of us. The traditional paradigm of digging deeper or waiting for the other shoe to drop comes under some tension when the culprits have no shame or fear. It can create a silly dynamic, like looking for a smokier gun.
In this case, the president has talked for years about summarily executing drug traffickers. His defense secretary made his whole post-military career about defending those accused of war crimes and reanimating a tired old myth that military lawyers and weak-kneed politicians forced America’s warriors to fight with one-hand tied behind their backs.
With that as context, they initiated a lawless campaign of lethal strikes at sea against alleged drug-smuggling boats that violated U.S. and international law but which they publicized, touted, and defended on the flimsiest of pretexts. They created a spectacle of U.S. military might, releasing aerial footage of the strikes on social media for maximum virality, and proudly thumped their chests.
But they also re-created a patented element of the Trump reality TV presidency: a spectacle without transparency.
How do they know the boats under attack are smuggling drugs? How do they know those aboard are complicit in the alleged drug smuggling? How do they know what drugs are aboard? How do they know the boats are destined for the United States?
The administration has offered little to nothing in the way of advance intelligence or post-action assessments to justify the attack. Instead, they offer wild and shifting factual claims. It was fentanyl or maybe cocaine. The boats were headed for the U.S. or maybe Trinidad.
As for its legal rationale, the administration could not offer any transparency there for weeks, either. It couldn’t explain to Congress or the American public the legal basis for the attacks, and when it eventually came up with one — a self-serving Office of Legal Counsel memo — it kept the document secret.
Against this backdrop of a clearly unlawful high seas campaign came the WaPo story last Friday that survivors of a Sept 2. attack had been killed in a second strike. Even this wasn’t entirely new. The Intercept reported on the attack a week later, on Sept. 10, in a story very clearly headlined “U.S. Attacked Boat Near Venezuela Multiple Times to Kill Survivors.” But the WaPo story breathed fresh life into the scandal because, although it didn’t say so, it left the impression with many readers that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had issued a second order specifically to kill the survivors.
Killing survivors at sea is egregiously lawless conduct. It was enough finally to nudge some Hill Republicans out of their Trump torpor. The who, what, when, where, why, and how still matter. But the antiquated notion that this is a cover-up of a crime that will eventually be revealed for all to see doesn’t grapple with how things work in the Trump era.
There’s been quite a bit of speculation that the Democratic members of Congress who released a video last month urging service members to follow the law and not abide by unlawful military orders must have gotten wind of the double tap strike, which prompted them to go public. Perhaps.
“A very small number of Senate and House staffers separately received highly classified briefings about the attack on Tuesday,” The Intercept reported at the time. “No senators or House members were in attendance, people familiar with the briefings told The Intercept.”
But by the time the Democrats’ video was released, the unlawful campaign was more than two months old and was by itself — independent of the double tap strike — an obvious example of illegal military orders. The OLC memo as much as acknowledged this by reportedly offering service members involved in the campaign sweeping immunity from future prosecution.
Given all of the context above, it sets the bar needlessly high to withhold judgment or to wait and see or turn the story into a kind of fox chase by getting hyper-focused on whether it was Hegseth or Adm. Frank M. Bradley who issued the key orders, whether Hegseth watched the real-time video of the second strike, and whether there is some arcane justification by which the wrecked ship with survivors clinging to it might still have posed a threat.
Again, the whole campaign is unlawful. The initial strike was unlawful. The subsequent strike was unlawful.
To say, as I am here, that we already know enough to make strong judgments about who is culpable and for what, isn’t to say that we should eschew new facts or information that provides more transparency into what has happened in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since this summer. But it is to say we should be confident in exercising those judgments and not fall into the trap of becoming so focused on the remaining unknowns that the intentional lack of transparency becomes an obstacle that we are helpless to see through.
Trump surely isn’t waiting around. He said he would “start doing strikes on land, too.”
Quote of the Day
“Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle. Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain.”–an anonymous House Republican, after the GOP won the TN-07 special election by a much narrower margin than Trump won the district in 2024
For the Record …
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