The president has murdered 200 people instead of arresting them. We won't forget.

In recent days, the military announced more lethal strikes in Trump’s campaign against “drug boats” in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes are as illegal as ever.

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump “joked” he could commit murder and get away with it. Ten years later, he’s trying to do it. But it won’t end the way he thinks.

In the past week, the Trump administration announced four more deadly strikes against small boats at sea. The last of them came on Saturday, when the Pentagon said it had blown apart a vessel in the eastern Pacific and killed three men aboard. The boat was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it said, and the dead were “narco-terrorists.” As always, it was offered without a shred of evidence. The video, posted to social media like a trophy, showed a tiny craft on open water and then a fireball where the craft used to be.

That strike pushed the total past a grim threshold. More than 200 people have now been killed in Trump’s campaign against “drug boats” since it began in early September. I can tell you from firsthand experience that all of them could have been arrested instead. In other words, the murders are a choice — and one that will have historic consequences.

The current count is 205 dead, to be exact. Two hundred and five human beings, incinerated from the air, on the say-so of a White House that has refused to show the public, the courts, or even most of Congress what it claims to know that would justify using the kind of targeted-killing tactics we associated with covert CIA operations.

I want to dwell for an extra beat on what that number means, because the administration works very hard to keep it abstract. Every one of those 205 people could have been picked up by routine law-enforcement interdiction. The maritime equivalent of getting “pulled over.” I know firsthand that this is possible because it’s exactly what the United States did every day when I was at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and continues to do in parallel right now. The Coast Guard is still out there intercepting suspected smuggling vessels, boarding them, seizing the drugs, and detaining the people aboard without killing a soul.

Yes, drug trafficking is a crime. Some of the perpetrators are very bad. Those criminals get arrested, charged, prosecuted, and jailed. But the president has decided he can send a louder message if he simply kills those suspects without trial instead of catching them. And he has done it now 205 times.

If you don’t already, I want you to understand that this is not a close legal question, and it never was. I’ve been warning that this exact thing was coming for years because I sat in one of the rooms while the idea was first floated. The first time we showed Donald Trump the map of maritime drug routes into America in 2018, on a trip to Key West, his aides started chattering about ways to go “full Sicario” (the 2015 film about the CIA launching a cartel war) literally on the flight home. Stephen Miller asked whether armed U.S. drones could simply fire on boats in international waters, and whether the people aboard were protected by the Constitution.

The answer back was simple. It didn’t require any legal consultation. It would be illegal, we told him. You cannot kill unarmed civilians because a president has decided to call them terrorists. Stephen Miller dropped it. Yet eight years later, he is reportedly one of the architects of the policy he once denied ever discussing.

So how on earth is the administration justifying it now?

The answer is by keeping the justification in the dark. For now. But elements of the classified Justice Department memo approving these strikes have purportedly leaked. Unsurprisingly, it turns out Trump’s much-more-dutiful, second-term officials were willing to oblige. They’ve allegedly crafted a backward-engineered justification dressed up as analysis for the killings, labeling them an act of “collective self-defense” on behalf of other countries in the region (who never asked for it) against drug soldiers in an “armed conflict” that doesn’t exist.

It gets crazier. Because the whole argument allegedly rests on the obscene sleight of hand that the boat is the target and the people aboard are merely incidental. That’s right. The Trump administration is making the case that there’s an ongoing war in Latin America… that we’re technically not a part of… but that we’ve agreed to fight on behalf of our allies… who didn’t ask us to… which means the targets aren’t criminals … they’re now suddenly soldiers in a war zone… even though they’re just moving along regular fishing routes… but we’re not actually targeting those so-called soldiers… we’re just trying to blow up their boats… like they’re tanks on a battlefield… and the dead bodies are collateral damage.

When I was in government, if I’d so much as joked about such a thing in a meeting, I would’ve been reported to the inspector general, the FBI, or Congress.

The administration’s own public justifications have shown how hard it is for them to stand by this program. Their story has mutated so many times — on one particular day, I counted twenty-five distinct, contradictory claims to explain why all of this was “legal” — that the shifting itself is a very loud confession. Even a conservative legal analyst like Andrew Napolitano looked at the controversial September strike on survivors clinging to debris and called it what it was: a war crime that should be prosecuted.

So set aside the question of whether this is wrong and illegal. (It is.) The more useful question now is the one the administration is trying hardest not to think about. What happens next?

Here’s what I believe happens next, and why the people who carried this out should be calling their lawyers and paying their retainer fees.

First, Democrats are very likely to retake at least one chamber of Congress. The day they do, they get subpoena power, and the first thing a serious oversight committee will do is start pulling the thread on the obvious crimes committed by the Trump administration. This boat-strike campaign is top of the list.

Second, congressional investigators will ask the only questions that matter in any abuse-of-power inquiry: who knew, and when did they know it? They will go looking for the paper trail, and they will undoubtedly find it. I suspect they will find that many of the quiet firings and resignations across the national security and legal apparatus over the past year were not coincidental — and that lawyers and officials who raised objections were pushed out or walked out precisely because of this program.

Third, we will probably discover conclusively that senior Trump officials were told, in writing or to their faces, that what they were doing was illegal, and they did it anyway. Investigators will find the deliberate effort to keep the memo classified, to keep Congress in the dark, and to keep the public from understanding what was being done in its name. They will then follow the authorizations up the chain (over the objections of the lawyers who knew better) until the trail reaches the very top.

In other words, they are going to discover pervasive criminality. The culprits won’t be able to claim a tragic incident in the fog of war. They’ll have to explain why they stood by a program built and run on the knowing decision to use military force where the law does not permit it.

Fourth, current and former officials will have no choice but to lawyer up and answer subpoenas under oath. The White House will fight some of those demands. It will assert privilege, it will stall, and it will dangle presidential pardons as protection. But that protection won’t be able to fully shield folks from accountability for murder on the high seas or the associated coverup.

Fifth, when a new administration eventually takes office, the Justice Department will inherit the inquiry and accelerate it with the full weight of federal investigative power behind it while cooperating with international, state, and local investigators wherever necessary. Charges will be brought. And at some point — I suspect sooner than the guilty parties imagine — people are going to be sitting in jail cells for having gone forward with the killing of suspects who could’ve been arrested instead of annihilated from the sky.

Drug dealers or not, that is murder, and murder is a crime. And somewhere inside the Trump administration, I suspect there’s a paper trail tying the president to it directly. And so he will face accountability. It would not be like the “Fifth Avenue” shooting he hypothesized, where he could fire and forget and get away with it. One way or another, his authorization of this effort will find its way back to him.

He’s not the only one.

Any person involved in this on the inside probably has their Google alerts turned on to notify them of each shred of news about this program. To see if Congress was opening a broader inquiry. To see if people are still talking about whether it’s “legal,” hoping the country will finally forgotten. Which is why there’s a real chance that someone tied to the drug-boat murders will stumble across this article.

So I want to address the final portion of this piece to them — the people participating in Trump’s deadly strikes.

Maybe you signed one of the pieces of paper that made this possible. Perhaps you stayed in the room when you should’ve walked out. Trust me, I’ve been there before. Or maybe you drafted a talking point you knew was a lie, or relayed an order you knew was unlawful. Right now, you’re telling yourself the comforting thing that everyone in your position tells themselves. They’ll forget about me. I’m too far down the list. I’ll keep my head down, and this will pass.

I’m going to break the hard news to you. We won’t forget.

Whatever plans you have (to slip quietly back into the private sector, hang a consulting shingle, or fade into a comfortable obscurity) are going to be destroyed by the ghosts of these dead boaters, who will come back to haunt you personally, professionally, and politically. You will spend more money on lawyers than you actually have. You will realize, with a sick feeling, that it costs tens of thousands of dollars just to answer the questions coming from Capitol Hill, before anyone has even decided whether you’re a target. Once again, I’ve been there before. And in that moment you’re going to wish you’d done the one thing I’m about to tell you to do.

Blow the whistle. Now. While it still counts for something.

If you believe you’ve witnessed a manifestly illegal order or criminal conduct, there’s time to act. You can go to Congress, go to the inspectors general, go to lawful counsel, and put the truth on the record before someone else puts your name on it for you. Your pals inside the Trump administration aren’t going to have your back when they’re under pressure to flip and name names. You could do it because it’s right, but if that argument doesn’t move you, then you could do it out of pure self-interest, because it may be the last chance you get to save your own skin.

The principle that “I was only following orders” is not a defense. That was settled at the Nuremberg trials. Culprits found they couldn’t save themselves by wrapping their participation up in the mundanity of bureaucratic process.

If you decide to ignore me, then understand exactly where you’re standing. You’re on the deck of a ship that’s in danger. Soon, you’ll be the one out on the open water when the second missile comes. You’ll be clinging to the wreckage in the vast ocean. If that happens, just remember, Donald Trump put you there. And you chose to stay.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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