Rep. Adam Smith condemns U.S. military strikes on two Pacific boats (killing five), calling them part of an illegal, unconstitutional program under Trump’s administration—targeting Venezuela while shifting explanations from drug trafficking to regime change. He warns that Trump’s 2024 "narco-terrorist" designations and $6B+ AUMF misuse mirror past overreach, with strikes often aimed at Europe/Africa and no fentanyl link. Smith criticizes classified briefings’ lack of transparency, including a September 2nd "double-tap" strike on survivors, and doubts the White House will comply with NDAA’s December 19th disclosure deadline. These actions, he argues, erode democratic checks, setting a precedent for unaccountable executive power that threatens both domestic stability and global rule of law. [Automatically generated summary]
Climate change, agriculture, baseball, and gender identity.
At 8.15 p.m. Eastern, David Horowitz Freedom Center president Michael Finch, with his book, A Time to Stand, talks about his essays on American Liberty, Culture, and Faith.
And then at 9.15 p.m. Eastern, Republican strategist and CNN commentator Scott Jennings, with his book A Revolution of Common Sense, gives his account of President Trump's second term to date.
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And look, there's been a long history in this country of presidents using their authority as commander-in-chief combined with their inherent right of self-defense, which has been interpreted from the sec, sorry, Article 2 of the Constitution for the president.
And we've done a lot of things over, gosh, centuries.
But what's different about this is normally those conflicts, many cases, they have had some kind of congressional authority.
You had the Gulf of Punkin resolution for Vietnam.
You had the UA, sorry, the AUMF after 9-11.
This time, there is no congressional authorization whatsoever.
And second, conflicts that have been done without congressional authorization, Panama, Grenada, Libya, have always been very confined in their goals and short in duration, usually less than a month, two months at the most.
President Trump has taken us into an endless conflict with drug narratives with the narcoterrorists, as he calls them, in Venezuela without any congressional approval, and frankly, also without an adequate explanation.
We've had some classified briefs.
They waited a couple of months before they actually even started briefing Congress in a classified setting.
We have not had the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State come before the appropriate congressional committee, armed services or foreign affairs, and said, this is what we're doing.
This is why we're doing it.
This is where it's going.
And then to be questioned by the people's representatives.
Okay, where is it really going?
There's been no effort to do that.
So I think this significantly undermines our Constitution is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Basically, what the president has decided is that we are now going to have the death penalty for drug traffickers.
But further, not only are we going to have the death penalty, but Trump is going to be judge, jury, and executioner.
He's not going to have to show any evidence or probable cause.
He's going to make the decision and he's going to start killing people.
That, again, is a massive expansion of presidential power.
Now, I think there's a lot of concern in Congress that those past AUMFs that we have passed, even going back to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, have been taken by the president and then used in a massive and very broad way.
So there's a reluctance in Congress to give that authority.
But I really want people to understand that what Trump is doing with his presidency, and this is true in domestic policy as well as foreign policy, is he is day in and day out undermining the rule of law.
He is doing what he wants to do regardless of the Constitution.
He's not spending money as Congress intended.
He is spending money wherever he wants without congressional approval.
He's sending troops into U.S. cities.
He's slapping tariffs that are supposed to be the purview of Congress.
And I think the problem here is people tend to say, oh, well, come on.
Everybody sort of colors outside the lines a little bit.
You say the rule of law, international rules-based order, but there's all kinds of times when people go outside that.
And that's true.
But by and large, every president we've had and every Congress we've had has recognized that that law matters.
They've had arguments about what it means, how to interpret it, when they've gone over the line when they haven't.
This president, you know, and sorry, it's early in the morning.
I'm trying not to swear.
This president has a way of saying, yeah, to hell with you.
I don't care what the law is.
I'm doing what I want to do, and you all just have to eat it.
And that is a significant change in how we are supposed to govern ourselves, both in terms of domestic policy, but also international law, which has huge implications.
The chairs and rankings got a briefing from Admiral Bradley.
Admiral Bradley's the one who has briefed us.
He is the, well, he's now the Special Operations Command Commander.
At the time of the strikes in September, he was the JSOC commander, Joint Special Operations Command, which oversaw and is still overseeing the strikes in Latin America.
So he briefed first the four of us, and then he briefed the full Armed Services Committees, both House and Senate, two days ago now.
Well, I mean, the main focus of it, well, it's two focus.
One, the so-called double-tap strike on September 2nd, and then the entire operation.
And what is the legal justification for the entire operation, which you have to really walk into the weeds to understand what their justification is.
But basically, overall, they're trying to connect it to the al-Qaeda fight and the ISIS fight, the AUMF that I referenced a few minutes ago, and we gave the authority to do that.
And they say, okay, we designated terrorist groups in the 2001 AUMF, and then the president was able to go after them and their affiliates.
So now we've decided that there are 24 narco-terrorist groups, and they are treated just like al-Qaeda, and therefore you can kill anyone associated with them, sorry, part of them or affiliated with them.
And then also the drugs are sort of their weapon.
So if they're close to the drugs, you can destroy those and kill the people.
Now, the difference is multiple.
One, no congressional authorization.
Admiral Bradley has said many times that he has ordered hundreds, almost a thousand of these strikes of one kind or another, so he knows what he's doing, and he does.
But he always had congressional authority.
He does not now.
This is simply what the president said.
And second, you have to ask yourself the question, is Osama bin Laden plotting actively to kill as many Americans as he possibly can, flying planes into buildings, whatever method he can.
Is that the same as people trying to sell cocaine in America?
I don't think it's the same.
Obviously, drug abuse is a major problem in the U.S.
But if you expand the president's authority to that degree, again, anyone selling narcotics is now a legit target for the president to kill without any probable cause.
I mean, that's a massive expansion of presidential power that is going to undermine our rights.
And let's also remember that fentanyl is the biggest killer in America.
There's no fentanyl involved here.
You know, Venezuela, it's all cocaine and marijuana to some extent.
Second, most of the votes that they've been striking, according to our intelligence, are headed to West Africa and then Europe.
So they're not even coming to the U.S.
I mean, it's one thing to say Anwar al-Awaki was a guy who was plotting attacks out of Yemen.
He put bombs on a couple of, I think it was a FedEx and a UPS plane that were discovered and taken off.
I mean, he's putting a bomb on a plane that's going to blow up over a U.S. city with a bunch of people on it and kill a bunch of people.
Is that the same as 11 people working for a drug trafficker shipping cocaine to a transshipment point to be sent God knows where?
Is that so serious that we need to let the president of the United States use the military to kill people?
And look, al-Qaeda affiliates are still out there.
It's metastasized a great deal in the last 24 years.
ISIS grew up.
I mentioned Alwaki.
He was part of a thing called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on Yemen, al-Shabaab in Somalia.
You've got a variety of different Islamic Islamist terrorist groups in West Africa.
And it's still being used as an authority to hit terrorists.
Now, they've tried to narrow that down to say we're going after the really big threats, the transnational people who are directly threatening the U.S. are or U.S. interests.
Massive acquisition reform is contained in that bill, which was the most important part of it.
And we did not directly deal with it, except we did fence Secretary Hagset's travel budget until he releases the information on those strikes.
All the videos, all the legal justifications.
They haven't even given us the execute order, which was issued on August 5th, which was the direction to the Secretary of Defense, here's what you do on this campaign.
We haven't seen it.
And that's the rules of engagement.
That factors into, and sorry, I didn't get into the details of the double-tap strike.
We can do that during the questions.
That factors into the decision that Admiral Bradley made to do a second strike on two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the boat that had been hit by the first strike.
What was the reason for that?
That's contained in the execute order, which they haven't given us.
So that was in the bill to require them to turn that information over to Congress.
Yeah, well, you remember the part I said about how Trump doesn't think he has to follow the law that he doesn't want to follow?
I tend to think it means that he's not going to follow the law that he doesn't want to follow, and we're going to have to try to figure out some way to sue him and hope that the court finally decides that the rule of law does in fact matter more than Trump being able to do whatever he wants to do.
We'll go to Scott first in New York, an independent.
Welcome to the conversation with the Congressman.
unidentified
Go ahead.
Yes, thank you.
God bless everybody and happy holidays.
First I want to say God made pot man ruin cannabis, okay?
But something I've been trying to get over there since I watched a couple boats get blown into the water and I see all that cocaine go flying up in the air and land in the ocean and all the fish and all the ocean life is getting these thousands of pounds of cocaine ruining our ocean life.
Why is nobody addressing that?
I know the EPA is no longer around to address these things, but how come we can't stop it there?
When I look at some of these boats, they don't even look like they have drugs on them.
Like, for instance, the double strike, there was 11 people on that boat.
I guarantee they weren't carrying drugs because they would only have two or three people on the boat.
Yeah, on the first point, I'm not an oceanographer.
I don't know what impact it's having.
The cocaine is being spread out into the Caribbean.
I'd have to find out about that.
But yeah, your point is, let me make two points.
I, by and large, trust the intelligence that they've gathered, that the people they've been blowing up are more than likely drug traffickers.
There's more than likely cocaine in that boat.
They've done the intelligence.
Now, crucially, they haven't shared that intelligence with us.
And this is bizarre.
I've never seen this in all the time I've been on the Armed Services Committee.
The Intel Committee is supposed to get briefed.
Okay, you say this is what the Intel shows.
Show us your work, basically.
What are the connections?
You know, let's listen in on some of the SIGINT or whatever else that you've picked up on, telephone calls that they've picked up on.
They're not showing any of that to us.
So we're kind of having to take their word on that.
But then specifically to the point about that double tap strike.
So you got the boat out there with 11 people on it.
First thing hits them, sets on fire, capsizes, nine of them die.
The smoke clears, and you got two people clinging, as I said, to a capsized boat.
The bow of the boat is the only portion of the boat that's above water, and it's going up and down and in and out in terms of how much of it actually is above water, depending on the wave.
And the assumption that led Admiral Bradley to do the second strike is that somehow the cocaine was still underneath that portion of the boat that survived.
Now, is that possible?
Sure, it's possible.
But there was no way to know that.
And yes, they made the assumption that it was still there, and that was part of the justification for the second lethal strike.
Yeah, it depends on the circumstances, and it does.
Now, there is a particular thing about this happening at sea.
If you are deemed to be shipwrecked, and this is actually what they refer to as a term of art, if you are shipwrecked, you are no longer a legitimate target in a war.
You are no longer considered an enemy combatant.
So that was the debate.
Are these guys shipwrecked?
Tell you, man, if you see that video, they sure look shipwrecked to me.
But they came up with this convoluted argument that A, the drugs could have been under there, B, and that they had no power over the boat.
They had no ability to communicate.
And a lot of the Republicans who have seen this video have been very dishonest and say, oh, they were trying to flip the boat.
They were communicating with their rendezvous point.
There was no communications devices.
The boat, they had no control of the boat.
They weren't flipping that boat back over.
They tried, failed, gave up.
And there was no other ship or plane in the area that we could see at all.
So no one was coming to get them.
They're drifting with the current.
And the estimation was they would probably drift ashore somewhere in Venezuela in about eight hours.
To assume that they were getting back into the mission on that is just an enormous assumption.
And the law of war is clear.
If they are out of the fight, they're no longer legitimate targets.
unidentified
Friday, December 19th, marks the deadline for the Trump administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
The Associated Press and others are reporting that the Justice Department has begun to post the documents, which was mandated by law after the House and Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act earlier this year.
The White House released this statement.
The Trump administration is the most transparent in history.
By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee's subpoena request, and President Trump recently calling for further investigations into Epstein's Democrat friends, the Trump administration has done more for the victims than Democrats ever have.
And while President Trump is delivering on his promises, Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Stacey Plaskett have yet to explain why they were soliciting money and meetings from Epstein after he was a convicted sex offender.
The American people deserve answers.
And that was from the White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson.