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WASHINGTON (CN) — Senate Democrats on Thursday demanded a public hearing to grill Justice Department officials who offered legal justification for the Pentagon’s airstrikes against suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean.
But the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top lawmaker has already shot the idea down, arguing that the agency’s legal opinion had explained the Trump administration’s “lawful authority” to carry out more than 20 strikes against vessels it has claimed were smuggling drugs into the U.S.
The move comes amid heightened scrutiny on the Trump administration over the attacks, which some critics have claimed violate international law and Defense Department policy. And it comes just hours after Senate Republicans blocked an attempt to force the agency to publicly release footage of the infamous Sept. 2 “double tap” strike on a supposed drug boat.
In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, dated Thursday, the panel’s Democratic contingent urged the Iowa Republican to convene a hearing examining the legality of Trump’s Venezuela boat strikes.
The lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, said that they wanted to interrogate Justice Department lawyers who had determined that the strikes were legal.
“This committee must address the serious concerns that these strikes may violate U.S. criminal laws, and that Department of Justice attorneys who gave President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth legal cover to summarily execute suspected criminals have violated their ethical obligations,” the senators wrote.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel authored a legal opinion justifying the strikes the U.S. military has carried out so far on vessels the Pentagon and President Donald Trump have claimed were carrying “narco-terrorists.”
But some lawmakers who reviewed the opinion have said they found it lacking. Virginia Senator Tim Kaine said last month that the document was based on a “misreading” of Constitution-era texts.
A group of former government ethics officials have also asked the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to look into whether the attorneys who authored the opinion had violated their ethical responsibilities.
“There is not, nor can there be, any justification for state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings,” the Senate Democrats told Grassley. “Summary executions have no place in a constitutional democracy operating under the rule of law, no matter how heinous the accusations a government makes against someone.”
The lawmakers argued that the U.S. has historically condemned extrajudicial killings and that the State Department has condemned such action by foreign governments as “significant abuses of internationally recognized human rights.”
“The American people want real solutions to crime and the drug epidemic — not extrajudicial killings committed in their name,” the Democrats said.
But Grassley signaled in a statement that the Judiciary Committee would not be holding any hearing on the issue.
“I personally made sure that both the majority and minority sides of the committee got access to the Office of Legal Counsel’s well-written classified opinion explaining the administration’s lawful authority to conduct these strikes,” he told Courthouse News. “Since these are military operations, primary oversight would fall within the jurisdiction of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”
Grassley added that Trump was “protecting Americans from a product that could kill them.”
Meanwhile, members of Congress this week amped pressure on the Pentagon to divulge more information about its campaign in the Caribbean, demanding that Hegseth publish unedited footage of the Sept. 2 “double tap” strike, in which the military carried out a second attack on survivors of an initial strike against a supposed drug boat.
Hegseth has refused to make the video public, telling lawmakers in a private meeting on Tuesday that releasing the clip would be a national security risk. But a select group of House and Senate committee members got to view the footage on Wednesday.
Senate Republicans on Wednesday evening blocked an effort from California Senator Adam Schiff to force a vote on legislation directing the Pentagon to publish the “double tap” video.
Schiff, who sits on the Judiciary Committee and signed Thursday’s letter to Grassley, said on the Senate floor that the legality of the strikes “has been called into serious question.”
“An attack on shipwrecked sailors is expressly prohibited by the laws of war,” said the California Democrat. “The rationale for hiding this video seems far less about any nebulous claim of the need to protect sources or methods, and far more about protecting the administration from the accountability and oversight that the American people demand.”
The White House on Monday issued an executive order designating the drug fentanyl as a chemical weapon of mass destruction and directed the Justice Department to determine whether it needed “enhanced national security resources” from the Pentagon to respond to “an emergency situation involving a weapon of mass destruction.”
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