(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing over whether presidents qualified for de-facto immunity while in office confirmed what many have suspected for years: The Justice Department views it as legal for the country’s top executive to assassinate Americans.
The question of presidential assassinations was raised by Justice Brett Kavanagh after DOJ attorney Michael Dreeben suggested that there are “presidential responsibilities that Congress cannot regulate.”
“How about President Obama’s drone strikes?” Kavanaugh asked, referencing Obama’s at least 560 drone strikes that killed hundreds of civilians.
This dude.
Obama, as a President, had a murder clause – because a group of men found it legal – that means it's legit.
This dude will argue that point, while saying Trump had no legal authority as a leaving President to hold on to files that were given to him from NARA. Yikes. https://t.co/uOmv00Pin0 pic.twitter.com/nVoYV13MwQ
— Jeff Benzos (@SkullKingJDolla) April 25, 2024
“So, the Office of Legal Counsel looked at this very carefully and determined that, number one, the federal murder statute does apply to the executive branch,” Dreeben responded.
“The president wasn’t personally carrying out the strike, but the aiding and abetting laws are broad, and it determined that a public authority exception that’s built into statutes and that applied particularly to the murder statute, because it talks about unlawful killing, did not apply to the drone strike,” he said.
“This is actually the way that the system should function. The Department of Justice takes criminal law very seriously,” Dreeben continued. “It runs it through the analysis very carefully with established principles. It documents them. It explains them. And then the president can go forward in accordance with it. And there is no risk of prosecution for that course of activity.”
Dreeben’s response not only implied that a president can kill civilians; it implied that a president can murder Americans.
President Obama reportedly killed at least four Americans during his tenure, including a 16-year-old American boy—the son of a suspected American terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, whom Obama also murdered. Donald Trump then killed the boy’s sister when he took power.
While it may have been shocking to hear the DOJ confirm that presidents can kill citizens with impunity, legal scholars have suggested that the president had that power for years—as the ACLU noted in 2014.
“This extrajudicial killing program should make every American queasy … Four of the dead are Americans,” the ACLU said at the time.
“Astonishingly, President Obama’s Justice Department has said the courts have no role in deciding whether the killing of U.S. citizens far from any battlefield is lawful.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
