The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Pete Hegseth’s defense of the killing of two men clinging to an incapacitated boat is falling apart on multiple fronts. Lawmakers who saw a video of this killing have shared damning details about what they witnessed, and were now learning that the boat very well might not have been bound for the United States to begin with. All this comes as some Republicans appear to be quietly moving away from defending Hegseth on this. And there are increasing signs that this video may actually end up getting released, which would almost certainly wreck Hegseth’s story even further. We’re working through exactly where we are right now with Tess Bridgeman, co-editor-in-chief of the Just Security website and former national security lawyer on the Obama administration, who’s been doing sharp commentary on all this. Tess, good to have you on.

Tess Bridgeman: Thanks so much for having me.

Sargent: So before we get into the specifics of this latest bombing, let’s remind everybody of this: The United States has killed over 80 people that Trump has designated narcoterrorists, bombing these small boats in the Caribbean Sea on the grounds that by smuggling drugs, the people in them are waging war on the United States. Tess, can you just briefly recap why that’s so depraved, and why it’s almost certainly illegal?

Bridgeman: The thing to keep in mind, zooming out, is that The United States is quite simply not at war. There is no armed conflict going on between the United States and any criminal gang or cartel operating in the Western Hemisphere. Transporting drugs is not an act of war. It’s not a hostile act, and it can’t get you into an armed conflict. So whichever way you go about it, whether you look at the administration’s claim that transporting drugs that end up harming or killing some Americans constitutes an armed attack—that doesn’t hold water.

When you look at the idea that the people on these boats are somehow combatants engaged in hostilities themselves, that also is an absurd reading of the law that no serious expert would countenance. So whichever way you slice it—and they’ve tried to do it a couple of different ways—there’s simply no authority for the United States to be targeting these vessels or the people on them. And that means the law that does apply is domestic criminal law and international human rights law, making these killings murder and extrajudicial killings or summary executions, respectively.

Sargent: And they’re killing people who are civilians. Basically what experts have said is, OK, even if these people are doing bad things by smuggling drugs and doing things that could hurt the United States and hurt Americans, this should be subject to police action and the administration by turning this into a war, sort of reimagining it as a war, is essentially giving President Trump the authority to execute civilians, right?

Bridgeman: That’s right. And I’ve said repeatedly that I think the big story here is exactly what you just said, Greg: that there, is underlying this entire campaign, a notion that the president can—outside of the law, outside of armed conflict—can simply say, I’m designating these people terrorists, which is just a label, it doesn’t bring any authority with it to use force. Just labeling these people terrorists and asking the military to then kill them on that basis. That has never been done before in the history of the United States.

That is the clean break from the past that should be terrifying and chilling to us all. The idea that the president can misuse the military in this way, and has thus far gotten away with it, until Congress recently started applying some much-needed pressure—that is something that we should be focused on as the big story. Of course, there are lots of other wrinkles that we can get into, but asking the military to use........

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