Month: March 2026

A little more than 13 years ago, I got my hands on a confidential Obama administration legal memo that, in retrospect, may have given President Trump all the cover he needed to launch his military attack on Iran this weekend.

At the time, the issue on the table for Obama and his lawyers seemed far removed from the decision Trump just made: to start a war that, in its opening moments, decapitated the leader of a foreign country.

Instead, the question for the Obama crew was a more limited one: What was their basis for launching drone strikes to kill suspected Al Qaeda operatives— even if, as in one notorious case, the operative, Anwar Al-Awlaki, happened to be an American citizen who was born in New Mexico?

The Obama officials’ response was forceful and unapologetic: In a secret Justice Department legal memo— summarized and sent to Congress as a confidential (non-public) “white paper”— they held nothing back, arguing that their lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen were fully justified because they did not actually constitute “assassinations” theoretically banned by a decades-old executive order.

“A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination,” the Obama white paper read. “In the Department’s view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban.”

Strong language, to be sure. But it was how the administration defined its terms that caused the outrage when I published the previously secret white paper on the NBC News website.

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