CNN– Trump administration officials told lawmakers on Wednesday that the US is not currently planning to launch strikes inside Venezuela and doesn’t have a legal justification that would support attacks against any land targets right now, according to sources familiar with the briefing conducted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and an official from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Lawmakers were told during the classified session that the opinion produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to justify strikes against suspected drug boats, first reported by CNN last month, does not permit strikes inside Venezuela itself or any other territories, four sources said.
The “execute order” that launched the US military campaign against suspected drug boats that began in September also does not extend to land targets, the briefers said, according to the sources.
The officials did not rule out any potential future actions, one of the sources said.
The existing OLC opinion includes a list of 24 different cartels and criminal organizations based around Latin America it says the administration is authorized to target, according to one of the sources familiar with the document.
But the Trump administration is seeking a separate legal opinion from the Justice Department that would provide a justification for launching strikes against land targets without needing to ask Congress to authorize military force, though no decisions have been made yet to move forward with an attack inside the country, a US official said.
“What is true one day may very well not be the next,” said that US official when discussing the current state of the policy, pointing out that Trump has not decided how he will handle Venezuela.
The massive buildup of military assets in the Caribbean, which will soon include the Ford Carrier Strike Group, has raised questions about whether the US intends to strike inside Venezuela. But the briefers said the military assets are only moving there to support counternarcotic operations and conduct intelligence gathering, two of the sources said.
The administration has to date tried to avoid involving Congress in its military campaign around Latin America. A senior Justice Department official told Congress last week that the US military can continue its lethal strikes on alleged drug traffickers without congressional approval and that the administration is not bound by a decades-old war powers law that would mandate working with lawmakers, CNN has reported.
The US military has carried out 16 known strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September, killing at least 67 people. In several briefings to Congress, including the one on Wednesday, administration officials have acknowledged that they do not necessarily know the individual identities of each person on board a vessel before they attack it.
Strikes are instead conducted based on intelligence that the vessels are linked to a specific cartel or criminal organization, sources said. Administration officials walked through the process they use to identify and target the vessels and discussed the types of intelligence they had connecting the vessels to cartels during Wednesday’s briefing, one of the sources said.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters after the briefing, “I think our intelligence assets are quite good,” explaining that he believes the administration does have “visibility” into the transport of illegal drugs.
But he questioned why the administration had to use lethal force against the boats instead of interdicting them, as the Coast Guard has routinely done in the past, which could produce evidence of the trafficking.
House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Rep. Gregory Meeks, however, told CNN after the briefing that he heard “nothing” to convince him of the legality of the strikes. He also said the briefers did not share the evidence that ties the vessels or their passengers to the drug trade.
Administration officials have repeatedly said they have intelligence that ties the vessels to the drug trade, but have offered few details publicly.
“I can assure you that every one of these strikes involves boats and shipments that were tracked from the very beginning,” Rubio said in late October. “From the moment these things were put together, the moment they were coordinated, we know where they’re headed. We know what their drop-off points are; we know what organizations they’re involved in. These things are tracked very carefully.”
“There are hundreds of boats out there every single day, and there are many strikes that we walk away from and that the Department of War walks away from because it doesn’t meet the criteria,” he said in remarks to the press. “This goes through a very rigorous process.”
