As the Trump administration blows past a key congressional deadline, a top lawyer in the Department of Justice has claimed that the executive branch does not need the approval of Congress to continue conducting boat strikes in and around the Caribbean — an assertion outside experts say is patently false. Last week, Office of Legal Counsel T. Elliot Gaiser told a small group of members of…
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Department of Defense (DOD) officials told Democratic lawmakers in a brief on the U.S. military’s strikes against boats off the coast of northern South America that the military is not identifying the occupants of the boats before they bomb them. The Trump administration has targeted more than a dozen boats, mostly in the Caribbean Sea but some in the Pacific Ocean, killing at least 61 people…
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The Trump administration has now killed at least 43 people in 10 strikes against so-called drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. The threat of war against Venezuela and the surrounding region is growing as the Pentagon deploys the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, to the Caribbean. Alejandro Velasco, associate professor at New York University, says the Latin American…
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President Donald Trump claimed without citing legal authority on Thursday that he doesn’t need the approval of Congress to conduct his boat strike campaign in the Caribbean, simply saying his administration is “just gonna kill people.” In a press conference on Thursday, Trump also claimed that Congress was in favor of the strikes. When asked why he wouldn’t seek congressional approval for the…
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Less than a week after most journalists covering the US Department of Defense turned in their press credentials and carried out their belongings in boxes over Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new restrictions on reporters, his chief spokesperson announced “the next generation of the Pentagon press corps,” which critics quickly condemned as a collection of right-wing propagandists.
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has reportedly restricted Pentagon officials’ interactions with Congress or other legislators in a seeming attempt to further limit information on the U.S.’s military operations after he dumped the department’s press corps last week. On October 15, Hegseth and deputy Steve Feinberg sent a memo to Pentagon officials announcing a new policy mandating that any…
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