Charlie Savage

And Pete Hexeth has a general counsel and is part of an administration that is advised by the Justice Department.

But one of the things we know about this operation as it was getting put together in July, August, early September, leading up to this initial attack, is that the deliberations were very closely held and that few career military lawyers were allowed into the room.

There weren't a lot of lawyers, uniform lawyers, non-politically appointed lawyers, being allowed into the deliberations.

Pete Hegseth comes up as a platoon leader in war, not a senior commander, and he seems to have acquired a hostility towards the idea of military lawyers.

He talks about them as jagoffs in his memoir.

He seems to blame them for...

rules of engagement that he found to be unduly restrictive about when his troops could open fire on someone they saw as a threat.

And he seems to misunderstand that the Jags are not the ones setting those rules, the commanders are.

And he acquires from that this hostility.

And the first thing he does is he fires the top Jags of the services.

You know, he's been trying to replace them with...

not career active duty JAGs that have come up through the JAG Corps, but with National Guardsmen who are sort of more political officials coming out of states.

It's hard to answer not knowing the details of the sort of questions that we've been talking about that remain fuzzy.

And one of the issues here that listeners ought to understand is that we now know that behind the scenes, a couple days after this strike, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which is a very powerful agency,

node in the executive branch legal system produced or signed a memo that said that

It accepted Trump's determination that this is an armed conflict against the drug cartels and that all this stuff was lawful.

And part of the public justification of all this has been, how is it that the cartels are attacking us?

They're not attacking us.

They're selling an illicit consumer product.

That's bad, but it's not an armed attack on us.