A trio of former Obama and Biden administration officials has floated a plan to put President Trump's top military leaders in legal jeopardy abroad.
Independent journalist Natalie Winters reported that the former officials laid out a proposal in the liberal law and policy journal Just Security. It urges foreign countries to "quietly gather evidence" and "wait to issue indictments until Trump is out of office."
The countries in question include Colombia and Ecuador. The prime targets include Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Admiral Frank Bradley and General Francis Donovan.
The authors focused on the U.S. military's strikes on drug cartel boats in the Caribbean as the basis for prosecution. According to Winters, their argument treats the strikes as murder and explores international warrants and extradition.
The authors even count officials avoiding overseas travel as a meaningful consequence. They describe the outcome as "self-imposed travel restrictions to avoid arrest."
They favor prosecutions in the United States but see foreign courts as another route. That path, they concede, faces hurdles involving evidence and custody.
The essay, titled "International Accountability for U.S. Crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific," first ran in May and drew fresh scrutiny after Winters revived it. According to the Rothman Report, the authors also floated a fallback in which a third country could invoke universal jurisdiction to charge American officials with crimes against humanity.
The article was written by Sarah Harrison, Benjamin Farley and Tracey Begley. Winters detailed each author's ties to the Obama and Biden administrations.
Harrison served in the Obama administration as counselor to the Homeland Security secretary from 2015 to 2017. She later worked as a Pentagon associate general counsel, advising on the law governing American military activities.
Farley spent 13 years in government, including as an adviser to the State Department's Guantanamo closure envoy and as director of its Office of Terrorist Detentions. A career official whose service crossed administrations, he returned to the State Department in 2021, during President Biden's tenure.
He now works at the National Immigration Law Center on wartime and emergency powers. Begley previously served as a senior adviser in the State Department's Office of Global Criminal Justice.
The proposal quickly caught the attention of U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz. He warned that the effort could be illegal and vowed that the Justice Department would get to the bottom of it.
"Former Obama-Biden Admin officials are urging foreign adversaries to gather evidence so that a future Democrat White House can partner with them to detain and prosecute Trump Admin officials," Reitz wrote. "This kind of seditious meddling may be illegal."
He closed with a blunt promise. "DOJ will smoke it out. More to come," Reitz wrote.
The episode, highlighted by The Gateway Pundit, raises a pointed question about how far critics of the administration are willing to go. Encouraging foreign governments to build cases against sitting American military leaders would mark an extraordinary escalation in the fight over the President's policies.
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