Sen. Mark Kelly recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he has read the Justice Department’s classified legal rationale for destroying alleged drug boats and that it should be released.
Not only is the senator right, he has the power to counter the Trump administration’s pernicious secrecy and make the document public himself.
Kelly, like other members of Congress, has broad immunity to expose government lies, thanks to the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, which protects him from arrest or inquiry for statements he makes on the floor of the Senate. (The same protection extends to congressional aides.)
He can, and should, follow the lead of Sen. Mike Gravel, who read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.
Kelly should read the Trump administration’s legal justification for killing people without due process into the public record — without delay.
The document’s classified status shouldn’t stop him. In addition to Kelly having legislative immunity, records that are properly classified can still be declassified if their release is in the public interest.
The legal rationale for killing nearly a hundred people without due process meets that definition.
It’s also not clear that this record should have been classified in the first place, since records cannot be classified to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error.”
The strikes were legally dubious to begin with, and recent reports that defenseless survivors were targeted in a second strike add more weight to arguments that the legal justification shouldn’t be classified at all.
If Kelly truly believes the public deserves to know how the government is sanctioning these strikes, he should read the memo into the Congressional Record. We’re listening.
