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On Jan. 13, the Justice Department released a redacted version of an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memorandum laying out the purported legal justifications for the Trump administration’s military operation in Venezuela and forceful removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros.
The OLC memo says that the United States’s use of force against Venezuela “does not rise to the level of war in a constitutional sense,” and therefore the president does not have to seek authorization of these actions from Congress. The memo instead analyzes the actions in the context of drug trafficking and argues the president “has inherent constitutional power to authorize law enforcement activities,” including “the extraterritorial arrest of fugitives even if the statutes otherwise law enforcement action are ‘construed as authorizing enforcement only within the limits imposed by international law.’” In other words, according to the OLC, the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela are consistent with both domestic and international law.