Democrats say the Trump administration still won’t share critical details of recent US military strikes on suspected drug boats in the western hemisphere, asserting that Pentagon lawyers were pulled at the last minute Thursday from a briefing on Capitol Hill.
As they emerged from the closed-door session, they railed on the administration for not being transparent and appearing to flout the law. The briefing came a day after Democrats say they were shut out of another meeting where administration officials shared information on the strikes with their Republican colleagues.
“Am I leaving satisfied? Absolutely not. And the last word that I gave to the admiral was, ‘I hope you recognize the constitutional peril that you are in and the peril you are putting our troops in’,” Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told reporters of the Thursday briefing.
“What I heard here today was a tactical brief. I heard no strategy, no end game, no assessment of how they are going to end the flow of drugs into the United States, which needs to happen, by the way,” Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, who sits on the House Armed Services and the Intelligence committees, said.
Fuming at a separate press conference over his accusation that the White House cut Democrats out of a Wednesday briefing, Sen. Mark Warner had an even sharper take: “bullsh*t.”
“Let me be blunt, what the administration did in the last 24 hours is corrosive, not only to our democracy, but downright dangerous for our national security,” Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.
The Trump administration in recent weeks has accelerated its attacks against boats they allege are involved in drug trafficking. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have repeatedly criticized the administration for failing to provide them with enough information related to those strikes.
The administration has defended its information sharing with Congress, telling CNN earlier this week it has given seven separate classified briefings on the strikes to various committees. But the information that Pentagon officials have offered so far on those attacks during closed-door briefings has largely fueled more questions and concerns from Democrats about the administration’s legal justification for them – especially as only select Republicans have been allowed to see the classified legal opinion detailing that argument.
Democrats said the information provided to them Thursday fell short of what they needed to provide proper congressional checks on the president’s war powers.
“I sit on the Armed Services and the Intelligence Committee. Our job is to oversee the use of lethal force by our military outside of the United States, and I’m walking away without an understanding of how and why they’re making an assessment that the use of lethal force is adequate here,” Crow said.
Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs of California similarly said “the level of transparency was not OK” and added that “there’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence.”
The briefers, Jacobs said, only cited Article II as the legal justification for the strikes and said they didn’t know the identities of all of the individuals involved in them. They also told lawmakers that cocaine was the only narcotic targeted in the strikes so far and claimed it is a “facilitating drug of fentanyl,” according to the congresswoman. “It was not a satisfactory answer for most of us,” she said.
CNN has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.
In addition to the Democratic ranking members, Republican chairmen of the House Intelligence and Armed Services committees attended the meeting but declined to comment to reporters afterward.
Rep. Mike Rogers, the Armed Services chairman, would only tell CNN he expects an additional briefing.
Still, several Senate Republicans said Democrats should have been invited to Wednesday’s briefing on the Caribbean boat strikes, though they insisted their exclusion wasn’t malicious.
“This is an unfortunate situation, and I wish it wouldn’t have happened this way. It did, but I’ve talked to a number of my colleagues already and told them that we still agree that this should be delivered on a bipartisan basis,” Sen. Mike Rounds, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said.
Rounds added that his understanding was that several GOP senators had requested a further briefing on the legality of the strikes, and other Republicans, including him, also asked to be included.
“When I got into the meeting, I realized that there were people from a lot of different committees, but I couldn’t identify the group in particular, but there were no Democrats there,” he said. “And so afterwards, we went back and followed up. The White House called us and said, ‘Yeah, this was a separate meeting. It was asked for by one of your colleagues.’ We just happen to have also been invited to it, and that is consistent with what we saw.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer agreed that his Democratic colleagues should have access to the same briefings as Republicans.
“I don’t think that any administration should leave out any party from a briefing of that level of importance. And I think their justification — you can argue it, and no doubt people will — but I don’t think that something of that importance shouldn’t be shared. Whether it’s legal justification or if there’s — if there are details about who are on these boats and what these boats are containing, you know, the tactics, I think all of that should be available to people who oversee the Pentagon,” Cramer said.
Senate Democrats didn’t hide their their frustration with the administration.
“It is totally unprecedented in my 15 years of service in the United States Senate that intelligence briefings on a matter of this consequence would be held for one party alone,” said an angry Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
“It speaks volumes to this administration concealing the facts and worrying about the law.”
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