Democrats Demand DOJ Investigate Caribbean Boat Strikes as Crimes

Two Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have formally asked the Department of Justice to criminally investigate whether the Trump administration committed war crimes — or premeditated murder — by directing the military to conduct the double-tap missile strike that targeted survivors clinging to a boat in the Caribbean in September.

“Given what we know about September 2, it must be one or the other,” Ranking Member Jamie Raskin and Rep. Ted Lieu wrote in a five-page letter on Monday.

Both Democrats emphasized that the Trump administration’s ongoing bombing campaign against sailors off the coast of South America “appears to be unlawful,” given that Congress has not approved any kind of military force against Venezuela or the drug cartels that the White House claims to be targeting without supporting evidence of their alleged crimes.

The U.S. government has claimed credit for killing 104 people in 26 missile strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, part of a military campaign dubbed “Joint Task Force Southern Spear.” The latest slaying on Dec. 18 killed what U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military activities in Latin America, said in a social media post were “five male narco-terrorists” in two separate boats.

In their letter to the DOJ on Monday, however, Raskin and Lieu focused on the very first bombing publicly announced by the Trump administration, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially described as “a lethal strike” — without clarifying that there were, in fact, two separate strikes.

It was only after The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth oversaw the attack and had ordered the military to “kill everybody” that the military admitted the operation occurred in phases, prompting lawmakers to demand to see the video. Several Democrats in Congress later called for the military to publicly release the haunting footage of two men killed as they clung to the wreckage after watching it earlier this month in a closed-door briefing with the military’s highest-ranking officer, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, and the commander who oversaw the strikes, Navy Adm. Frank M. Bradley. The Trump administration has refused to release the video.

Raskin and Lieu wrote that “these facts are alarming and warrant investigation,” asking that the Justice Department look into whether the killings violated the law.

“Giving a general order to kill any survivors constitutes a war crime. Similarly, carrying out such an order also constitutes a war crime,” they wrote, pointing to the military’s own courts-martial manual.

“Outside of war, the killing of unarmed, helpless men clinging to wreckage in open water is simply murder,” they added, noting that the federal criminal code would then apply.

The DOJ isn’t expected to acquiesce, given that the department is led by MAGA loyalists who both served as personal lawyers for Trump himself: Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. But on top of that, any criminal investigation would inevitably lead right back to the Justice Department headquarters, given that the DOJ’s own Office of Legal Counsel — the same department that once issued legal opinions giving the CIA legal cover to commit torture it deemed “enhanced interrogation techniques” — similarly authored a legal memo justifying the missile strikes.

However, Raskin and Lieu made clear that no OLC legal memo would shield Trump administration officials and military personnel from prison in the future.

“We remind you that, even if it is the policy of this administration to condone murder, a future administration will be free to revoke an OLC memo that it finds unprincipled, unpersuasive, or both,” they wrote, pointing to the way the Obama administration eliminated the torture memos five years after they were drafted.

The DOJ declined to answer questions about the letter and referred questions to the White House on whether it would make publicly available the OLC memo that purports to justify the killings. White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly did not answer that question but issued a statement that said “Hegseth has played a key role in executing the president’s agenda by authorizing strikes against designated narcoterrorists.”

Notably, even the author of those torture memos, former OLC deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo, came out in September against the boat strikes.

“You are not allowed to give orders that say, ‘No survivors.’” Yoo said on CNN this month. “And so, Hegseth cannot give that command legally … You can’t fire on the wounded, you can’t kill survivors who can no longer fight. And so, the admiral should not have obeyed the order that Secretary Hegseth gave. And even the soldiers who carried out the admiral’s orders should not have obeyed.”