Senator Says New Details of Venezuela Bombing Reveal 'Trump's Growing Lawlessness'

As new details emerged about the boat that the Trump administration bombed last week off the Venezuelan coast, legal experts and lawmakers said Wednesday that the White House's case for carrying out the unprecedented military strike against suspected drug smugglers had grown even weaker—with new evidence showing the vessel had turned away from the US, back toward Venezuela, just before it was bombed.

Legal analysts have said in the days since the attack that killed 11 people that the bombing amounted to an extrajudicial murder, dismissing President Donald Trump's claim that the White House has "tapes of [the victims] speaking" that proved they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—the only "evidence" that's been made public.

Even if the 11 people killed were members of the gang—which Trump has classified as a terrorist organization despite US intelligence agencies' finding that Tren de Aragua is a relatively low-level gang without connections to Venezuelan government—the administration used military force to stop a suspected criminal enterprise, instead of following law enforcement procedures, experts have said.

In a video posted on social media Wednesday, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it was highly unlikely that the boat was carrying fentanyl, which killed an estimated 48,422 people in the US in 2024 and which is primary trafficked through Central America and Mexico—not Venezuela.

"His stated reason for taking the strikes to try to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, makes no sense as the centerpiece of a counternarcotics strategy," said Murphy. "At the very same time that Trump is ordering these strikes on the boat in Venezuela, he's cutting, gutting the programs that we use to interrupt the drug trade coming through Central America and Mexico. We have dramatically fewer resources to stop fentanyl coming to the United States while we're taking airstrikes on a boat off the Venezeuelan coast."

The strike, said Murphy, particularly in light of the new information disclosed by US officials, is "another sign of Trump's growing lawlessness."

With US officials disclosing Wednesday that the boat had not been headed toward the US when it was bombed, a former military attorney told The New York Times that the new information further undermined Trump's claim that he ordered the strike to stop a threat to US national security.

"If someone is retreating, where's the 'imminent threat' then?" Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired judge advocate general for the Navy, told the Times. "Where’s the 'self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did."

The people aboard the vessel had turned back after spotting US planes that had been surveilling them "for a significant period of time," The Intercept reported. Three sources including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has expressed outrage over the strike, said the boat was attacked by at least one drone, and The Intercept reported that the victims survived an initial attack before being killed in the second one.

The strikes were conducted after the boat turned back toward the Venezuelan shore.

Officials told the Times that a 29-second video Trump released that was purported to show several clips of a speedboat racing toward the US before an explosion, left out key details of the event.

"It does not show the boat turning after the people aboard were apparently spooked by an aircraft above them, nor does it show the military making repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it," the Times reported.

A high-ranking Pentagon official told The Intercept that even if the White House's claim that the boat's passengers were trafficking drugs is true, the strike was a "criminal attack on civilians."

"The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”

US officials have yet to share information confirming where the vessel was headed; before the administration began claiming it was headed to US shores and driven by "evil narco-terrorists trying to poison our homeland," as one White House spokesperson said, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the boat was likely headed to another country in the Caribbean.