It’s been exactly one year since the Trump administration began indiscriminately attacking small watercraft traversing the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
In that time, the U.S. military has killed at least 227 civilians in some 65 strikes, according to an analysis published Wednesday by The Intercept.
“It’s been a year of murders,” a defense official told the outlet. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.… It’s absolutely criminal.”
The White House has insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia. A classified opinion penned last summer by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel attempted to shield the forthcoming attacks by claiming that suspected drug boats amounted to legitimate military targets.
But U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical on the matter. That’s partly due to the fact that several of the targeted boats were thousands of miles away in international waters at the time that they were struck by U.S. forces. Another reason is because the vast majority of the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction, leaving little ability to gather evidence that could support or refute the government’s allegations.
The administration’s lawless behavior has even restructured foreign governments. After blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the attacks and the alleged drug pipeline, U.S. forces stormed Caracas and abducted Maduro in the early morning hours of January 3.
The strikes themselves have been criticized as extrajudicial killings.
“There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept.
The first ever Republican midterm convention is being fueled by a dark-money web with a MAGA super PAC at its center.
The unprecedented gathering will take place on September 9 and 10 in Dallas. But the private group organizing the conference, a nonprofit known as the Dallas 2026 Host Committee, has not yet disclosed any of its donors (federally mandated filings that would offer such transparency still aren’t due for several months). The only insight available as to who’s behind the multimillion-dollar operation stems from the nonprofit’s address.
An OpenSecrets investigation published Tuesday found that the Dallas 2026 Host Committee shares an address with Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC formed in 2022 to back Donald Trump and his endorsed candidates.
Further still, the treasurer of MAGA Inc.—Charles Gantt—is also the listed custodian of the convention’s nonprofit, according to a Federal Election Commission filing and an IRS letter that tied Gantt to the self-advertised “nonpartisan” nonprofit.
Last month, the Dallas 2026 Host Committee told The Dallas Morning News that it raised $45 million in just 27 days from various independent and corporate contributions. That sum didn’t include the revenue expected from sales for the ticketed event, which requires even invited House members to pay a minimum of $25,000 to walk in the door with a guest.
The committee did not elaborate on who’s been filling its coffers.
The group’s nonprofit status legally prohibits it from sponsoring political candidates or aiding elections. Instead, organization leadership told the newspaper that the money it obtained would go toward aiding Dallas’s local economy and covering government costs.
