Pentagon embraces ‘war on cartels’ after announcing killing of 14 people onboard alleged drug-trafficking vessels in three separate operations
Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration’s defence secretary, announced on social media that US forces killed 14 people onboard alleged drug-trafficking vessels in three separate military operations on 27 October, and vowed that suspected narcotics smugglers will face the same treatment as terrorist organizations.
“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” Hegseth wrote Tuesday morning, adding: “We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”
There was one survivor. Hegseth said the strikes came at the direction of the Donald Trump.
Key events
Trump may host Central Asian leaders – report
Donald Trump will reportedly meet the presidents of five Central Asian nations next week in what marks a rare high-level gathering focused on the resource-rich former Soviet republics, a source familiar with the plans tells Reuters.
Should the 6 November meeting happen, it will bring together the leaders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Hugo Lowell
The justification for the strikes has been widely disputed by legal experts. For one, when the US killed al-Qaida members, Congress had authorized the use of force. In targeting drug cartel members, the administration has relied on Trump’s article II powers to defend the US against an imminent threat.
The latest boat strikes come as the US appears destined to start hitting land-based targets in the coming weeks, after the Pentagon sent its most advanced aircraft carrier and its strike group to the Caribbean — a major escalation in the Trump administration’s stated war against drug cartels.
The move is expected bring the USS Gerald Ford, with its dozens of fighter jets, and its accompanying destroyers, to the coast of Venezuela by roughly the end of the week, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Sending the carrier strike group to the Caribbean is the clearest sign to date that the administration intends to dramatically expand the scope of its lethal military campaign from hitting small boats alleged to be carrying drugs bound for the US to targets on land.
Read more from my colleague Hugo Lowell here
A GOP House member pushes for Mamdani’s deportation
A far-right Republican legislator has urged federal authorities to investigate whether Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral candidate, committed naturalization fraud by allegedly failing to disclose his Democratic Socialists of America affiliation and political views when becoming a US citizen.
The latest freak-out over Mamdani’s possible ascension to mayoralty comes from Andy Ogles, the Tennessee congressperson who claims in a letter to attorney general Pam Bondi that Mamdani “praised terrorists” and held views that “openly despised the US constitution” in 2017, and argues such positions should have been revealed during the citizenship process.
“If we deport Mamdani for breaking REAL laws, we can save NYC and take back our country from the Marxists who want to reduce America to a third-world wasteland,” he wrote on X.
Mike Johnson, while talking to reporters, said the pardons made by Joe Biden are “invalid on their face”.
“I used to be a constitutional lawyer,” the House speaker added. “I would love to take this case, go into the court and make that law to set the precedent”.
The Monday strikes hit four boats in three waves in the eastern Pacific ocean, Hegseth said. There were 14 confirmed killed, and one survivor, who was taken by Mexican search and rescue teams.
Prior to the missiles on Monday, US forces have carried out at least eight strikes against boats off the Caribbean over the last few weeks, killing 40 people.
Pentagon embraces ‘war on cartels’ after announcing killing of 14 people onboard alleged drug-trafficking vessels in three separate operations
Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration’s defence secretary, announced on social media that US forces killed 14 people onboard alleged drug-trafficking vessels in three separate military operations on 27 October, and vowed that suspected narcotics smugglers will face the same treatment as terrorist organizations.
“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” Hegseth wrote Tuesday morning, adding: “We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”
There was one survivor. Hegseth said the strikes came at the direction of the Donald Trump.
The GOP-led committee also released a staff report based on a 14-witness deposition alleging Biden’s advisors orchestrated a cover-up involving scripted appearances and restricted media access.
It claims that senior strategist Mike Donilon and other key advisors “stood to gain financially and politically” from maintaining Biden’s candidacy while suppressing evidence of his decline.
Three aides, including Biden’s physician Kevin O’Connor, invoked fifth amendment protections during the probe.
In a letter this morning, James Comer, the House oversight chair, has asked the justice department to investigate whether Joe Biden’s aides improperly used an autopen to sign executive actions, claiming the former president’s inner circle concealed his cognitive decline while exercising presidential authority without authorization.
“While President Biden’s deterioration was evident to the American people, and consequently, robust systems should have been put in place to document executive actions reflected the actual will of the president, the President’s inner circle took no action to establish such a record,” Comer wrote in the letter.
Trump’s legal team look to overturn his criminal conviction for business fraud
In a 96-page filing submitted late Monday, Donald Trump’s lawyers argued that the supreme court’s ruling on presidential immunity should have prevented Manhattan prosecutors from introducing evidence about his conduct while in office, in an appeal looking to overturn his historic criminal conviction.
Trump’s legal team said that testimony from Hope Hicks, his former White House communications director, should never have been allowed at trial, along with social media posts Trump made during his presidency. The evidence was used by prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office to help secure Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of business fraud related to concealing hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
“This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction,” his lawyers wrote.
That argument was already dismissed late last year by Justice Juan Merchan, the trial judge, who found that the evidence in question related to Trump’s private conduct rather than official presidential acts.
Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican congresswoman and potential gubernatorial candidate who berated Ivy League presidents in a congressional hearing about antisemitism and pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses, is writing a book that accuses America’s most prestigious universities of abandoning academic excellence for “radical leftist groupthink,” her publisher announced Tuesday.
In a new letter, House Democrats are warning three top Justice Department officials – including two who previously defended Donald Trump in criminal proceedings – that they could face prosecution if they approve Donald Trump’s suggestion of a $230m payment from American taxpayers.
They are calling it “perhaps the most brazen violation” of constitutional anti-corruption provisions in US history.
“Any DOJ official who signs off on a payment to President Trump in violation of this constitutional command will be personally complicit in that violation and subject to legal consequences”, the lawmakers wrote.
President Donald Trump and Uzbek president Shavkat Mirziyoyev will meet in Washington next week, deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau said on Tuesday after meeting officials in Uzbekistan.
The visit “should help pave the way for a great meeting between our presidents next week in Washington,” Landau wrote in a post on X.
“We very much enjoyed our candid and far-ranging discussion. Many opportunities to partner in the future.”
President Donald Trump said he would meet with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang on Wednesday.
Trump made the comment Tuesday in an address to business leaders in Tokyo before traveling to South Korea.
The US AI chipmaker said last week that Huang plans to meet “global leaders and top Korean executives” when he attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit in South Korea.
Eric Berger
A group of New Yorkers has filed a lawsuit against the state’s board of elections alleging that its congressional map unconstitutionally dilutes the voting power of Black and Latino residents of Staten Island.
The complaint, filed Monday, is another volley in the battle between Democrats and Republicans to redraw congressional districts in a way that favors their party in advance of the midterm elections.
The suit concerns the 11th congressional district, which is represented by Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, and challenges part of the map approved by the majority Democratic New York legislature less than two years ago.
But in the wake of Donald Trump’s call for Texas and other red states to redraw their maps to help the party pick up more seats in 2026, Democrats have responded by trying to do the same thing in states like California and Maryland.
Democrats in California and New York trying to counter Republican efforts could be hurt by their own efforts to prevent gerrymandering, said Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University and an expert on redistricting.
“The Democrats are trying to respond, but they have much greater obstacles – legal obstacles – in their way in places like California and New York, where they have engaged in this kind of good government redistricting reform and put hurdles in the way of being able to partisan gerrymander and do so on a mid-decade basis,” Kang said.
In New York, the lawsuit was filed by Elias Law Group, which has also worked with Democrats on court cases concerning redistricting and congressional maps in Texas, Nevada and Wisconsin.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Mario Guevara has said he may have been “the first” immigrant journalist whom Donald Trump’s administration deported from the US while working – but the Emmy award-winner added: “I don’t think [I’ll] be the only one.”
“Just be careful because [immigration agents are] very aggressive,” Guevara recently said from El Salvador in a virtual interview with the US Freedom of the Press Tracker, during which he was asked whether he had any message for other immigrant colleagues in the industry. “They showed they are – they don’t care about journalists. They don’t believe in the media.”
He continued: “They believe the media [are] against them. They see the media as an enemy … They have the power. They can do everything they want. It can be dangerous for us.”
Guevara delivered that chilling admonition amid what appeared to be the Salvadorian’s most extensive public remarks yet on his case, which culminated in his deportation from the US on 3 October as the federal immigration crackdown pursued by Trump throughout his second presidency barreled on.
On Sunday, three days after Guevara’s Tracker interview, the British journalist Sami Hamdi was detained by federal immigration authorities at San Francisco international airport.
A Trump administration official said Hamdi faced deportation after his detention and visa revocation – a plight which the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) alleged was retaliation for the Muslim political commentator’s having criticized Israel while touring the US.
“We are journalists – we try to be objective, but sometimes we have to report what is going on,” Guevara told the Tracker’s Briana Erickson. “They can think we are against them even if it’s not true.
“You can have retaliation for that. That was my case. Probably I was the first one – but I don’t think [I’ll] be the only one.”
The Trump administration on Monday asked the supreme court to allow it to fire the director of the US Copyright Office.
The administration’s newest emergency appeal to the high court was filed a month and a half after a federal appeals court in Washington held that the official, Shira Perlmutter, could not be unilaterally fired.
Nearly four weeks ago, the full District of Columbia circuit court of appeals refused to reconsider that ruling.
The case is the latest that relates to Donald Trump’s authority to install his own people at the head of federal agencies. The supreme court has largely allowed Trump to fire officials, even as court challenges proceed.
But this case concerns an office that is within the Library of Congress. Perlmutter is the register of copyrights and also advises Congress on copyright issues.
Solicitor general D John Sauer wrote in his filing on Monday that despite the ties to Congress, the register “wields executive power” in regulating copyrights.
Trump lauds Japan’s ‘great’ female leader on visit to Asia
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that president Donald Trump lavished praise on Japan’s first female leader Sanae Takaichi in Tokyo on Tuesday, welcoming her pledge to accelerate a military buildup and signing deals on trade and rare earths.
Takaichi, a protegee of Trump’s late friend and golfing buddy Japanese leader Shinzo Abe, applauded Trump’s push to resolve global conflicts, vowing to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt.
Both governments released a list of projects in the areas of energy, artificial intelligence and critical minerals in which Japanese companies are eyeing investments of up to $400 billion in the US, Reuters reported.
Tokyo pledged to provide $550 billion of strategic US investments, loans and guarantees earlier this year as part of a deal to win a reprieve from Trump’s punishing import tariffs.
Those gestures may temper any Trump demands for Tokyo to spend more towards its security in the face of an increasingly assertive China, calls that Takaichi sought to head off by promising to fast-track plans to increase defence spending to 2% of GDP.
“Everything I know from Shinzo and others, you will be one of the great prime ministers,” Trump told Takaichi as they sat down to discussions, accompanied by their delegations, at Tokyo’s Akasaka Palace.
“I’d also like to congratulate you on being the first woman prime minister. It’s a big deal,” Trump added.
In other developments:
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Trump left the door open to a third term, a constitutional impossibility, saying he “would love” to do it but wouldn’t use a vice presidential loophole, which he called “too cute.” “Am I not ruling it out? I mean you’ll have to tell me,” he said in a gaggle on Monday.
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Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to Trump’s refusal to rule out a third term: “No way in hell we’re going to let that happen.”
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In other 2028 news, Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, told CBS News Sunday Morning he plans to make a decision on whether to run for president in 2028 once the 2026 midterm elections are over.
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The head of America’s largest federal workers union says it is time to end the government shutdown, now the second-longest in US history, as hundreds of thousands of employees miss another round of paychecks.
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Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson blasted the chamber’s Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for his endorsement of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor’s race.
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And speaking of that shutdown, Johnson was asked whether he would call lawmakers back to Washington. He said he was “evaluating this day by day”.
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Indiana governor Mike Braun announced that he is calling a special session to consider redrawing congressional districts in the state, the latest state to work on its maps ahead of 2026.
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As Republican states launch more redistricting efforts, Democrats in blue states are still deciding how or if they will respond. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries is said to be headed to Illinois today, while in Virginia, the Democratic House speaker called a special session focused on redistricting.
