A federal judge in Texas just ruled that the Administration exceeded it's authority under the AEA.
. . .
I can't say the judge was "wrong" but the decision (in my opinion) walks a very fine line on the political question doctrine (this is based on a quick read of the decision, I'm sure opinions will differ on this point). . . .
If the intelligence contradicts the President, replace it with something that is not intelligent.
>>>New emails document how a top aide to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, ordered analysts to edit an assessment with the hope of insulating President Trump and Ms. Gabbard from being attacked for the administration’s claim that Venezuela’s government controls a criminal gang.
“We need to do some rewriting” and more analytic work “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” Joe Kent, the chief of staff to Ms. Gabbard, wrote in an email to a group of intelligence officials on April 3, using shorthand for Ms. Gabbard’s position and for the president of the United States.
The New York Times
reported last week that Mr. Kent had pushed analysts to redo their assessment, dated Feb. 26, of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, Tren de Aragua, after it
came to light that the assessment contradicted a subsequent claim by Mr. Trump. . . .
The issue centers on Mr. Trump’s invocation in March of a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the gang. . . . <<<
What's interesting about this (at least to me) is that the judge in Texas assumed for purposes of his decision that all facts stated by the administration were true based on his interpretation of the political question doctrine. This was what I was referring to in my prior post when I said it appeared to me that the judge was walking a fine line (it's not at all clear to me that courts are required to accept as true the statements by the government).
Despite assuming the asserted facts were true, the judge nevertheless ruled against the administration on the basis that the asserted facts did not constitute an "invasion or predatory incursion" as required by the AEA.
Conceivably, a different court could hold that it is not required to accept the government's statements as accurate, and allow admission of evidence that the statements are not accurate. This could (at least in theory) lead to another basis to hold that the AEA was not properly invoked. Briefly, the AEA requires that the invasion or incursion must be "
by any foreign nation or government."
"By" in the AEA clearly implies that there must be at least some degree of control of the the individuals in the U.S. by a foreign nation or government.
Trump stated:
>>>“TDA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States
both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise,
of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Mr. Trump declared, referring to the gang.<<<
This is contradicted by the intelligence assessments:
>>>But the U.S. intelligence community believes that the opposite is true: The gang is not controlled by the administration of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, nor committing crimes in the United States at its direction, according to the two assessments by the National Intelligence Council.
The council is an elite internal think-tank that reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It undertakes analytical projects at the request of policymakers, relying on information collected by agencies like the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency.<<<
