A Pirate’s Life for Me!
By 
Just imagine any other human saying this:
The United States has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, President Trump announced on Wednesday, a dramatic escalation in his administration’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
“As you probably know, we’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela,” Mr. Trump said during a White House event on a new luxury visa program. “A large tanker, very large. Largest one ever seized, actually, and other things are happening.”
Mr. Trump declined to say who owned the tanker. But when asked about the ship’s oil, he said: “Well, we keep it, I guess.”
“It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
The White House did not immediately respond when asked if the United States had the legal authority to keep the oil.
I’m sure that James Kraska will soon have an explanation for why high seas piracy is perfectly legal, just as soon as the administration figures out why it seized the ship. In other news:
The Pentagon was in a bind. The military had plucked two survivors from the Caribbean Sea in mid-October after striking a boat that U.S. officials said was carrying drugs, and it needed to figure out what to do with them.
On a call with counterparts at the State Department, Pentagon lawyers floated an idea. They asked whether the two survivors could be put into a notorious prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration had sent hundreds of Venezuelan deportees, three officials said.
The State Department lawyers were stunned, one official said, and rejected the idea. The survivors ended up being repatriated to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.
A little under two weeks later, on Oct. 29, Pentagon officials convened another session about boat strike survivors, a video conference involving dozens of American diplomats from across the Western Hemisphere. The message was that any rescued survivors should be sent back to their home countries or to a third country, said three other officials, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Behind that policy was a quieter goal: to ensure survivors did not end up in the U.S. judicial system, where court cases could force the administration to show evidence justifying President Trump’s military campaign in the region.
Because of course. More on this later, but I’m pretty sure that Conor Friedersdorf isn’t actually the Dumbest Guy on the Face of the Fucking Planet; he just has strong careerist reasons for pretending that he is.