Here’s the live feed for the 10:00 PM EDT Pentagon press briefing on the US, British, and French air strikes on Syrian targets.
From Spencer Ackerman’s February 20, 2018 reporting at The Daily Beast, here are the details on the legal justifications that the Trump Administration produced to justify today’s strikes on Syria.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson informed a senator in a recently-revealed letter that President Trump considers himself to possess inherent constitutional authority to launch military action without any act of Congress, a sweeping assertion that appears to resurrect from the early George W. Bush years the most imperial notions of the presidency.
Now a group comprised mostly of former Obama administration attorneys is suing to force disclosure of a seven-page Justice Department document they believe codifies the broad legal claim. As they await a judge’s verdict, they believe the secret opinion they seek provides a blueprint for the presidency to put the final nail in the long-constructed coffin for Congress’ own constitutional authority over American war.
Last April, Senator Tim Kaine watched Trump launch a cruise-missile fusillade against a Syrian airbase firmly under the control of regime dictator Bashar Assad. Trump publicly justified attacking the airbase as a means to impose costs on Assad for his chemical weapons attack.
Significantly, doing so bore no relationship to any congressionally-authorized war—not any adversary targetable under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF)—nor any defense of the U.S., its allies or its articulable interests. Kaine wondered: what was the administration’s legal basis for striking the Shayrat airfield?
It took until October for Kaine to get an answer. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, provided a three-sentence explanation in writing for a hearing on the AUMF; The Daily Beast acquired it after Kaine referenced it in a letter to Tillerson last week. Tillerson pointed to an asserted constitutional authority.
“The April 6 U.S. missile strike on Shayrat airfield in Syria was not based on the authority of the statutory authorizations for use of military force that we have been discussing at this hearing,” Tillerson told Kaine.“The President authorized that strike pursuant to his power under Article II of the Constitution as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to use this sort of military force overseas to defend important U.S. national interests. The U.S. military action was directed against Syrian military targets directly connected to the April 4 chemical weapons attack in Idlib and was justified and legitimate as a measure to deter and prevent Syria’s illegal and unacceptable use of chemical weapons.”
The document, according to Office of Legal Counsel attorney Paul Colborn, is the product of attorneys across multiple federal agencies “providing advice and recommendations to the president and/or other senior Executive Branch officials regarding the legal basis for potential military action.” The undated document was apparently written on or around April 6, the day of the Syria strike. A Justice Department official declined to comment or explain the document further.
Citing the filings, Kaine on Friday raised warnings in a follow-up letter to Tillerson, first reported by NBC, that the authorities the administration claimed risked an end-run around Congress to “become precedent for additional executive unitary action, including this week’s U.S. airstrikes in Syria against pro-Assad forces or even an extremely risky ‘bloody nose’ strike against North Korea.” Tillerson last month declared that U.S. troops will remain in Syria indefinitely, for missions beyond the anti-ISIS mission that itself has only a tenuous connection to the 2001 AUMF.
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