House Intelligence Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) condemned the United States’s “troubling” strikes on alleged drug boats on Sunday, saying the White House hasn’t shared its “legal justification” for these.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he ordered the U.S. military to carry out its fourth strike against a small boat carrying narcotics off the Venezuelan coast. Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on Wednesday that the latest strike was actually a Colombian boat with citizens from the South American country aboard.

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Himes said “we don’t know” if these boats were carrying narcotics since Congress isn’t being told who was aboard or what the identification process was. He said this lack of clarity is “OK” with the Republican majority in Congress, but not with him.

“I’m going to leave a little bit of a crack in the door here, because again, the White House has not shared what they believe their legal justification is. They did provide a memo. I will tell you that based on what I know now and the reading of that memo, these are illegal killings,” Himes said on CBS’s Face the Nation. 

“They are illegal killings because the notion that the United States, and this is what the administration says is their justification, is involved in an armed conflict with any drug dealers, Venezuelan drug dealers, is ludicrous,” Himes said.

Himes also said the Trump administration’s legal justifications are “laughable” and that President Donald Trump believes he has “absolute immunity” thanks to a “very compliant Supreme Court.” He added that he wouldn’t be surprised if all people involved in these strikes receive presidential pardons in the future.

CBS’s Margaret Brennan pressed Himes on whether he believes these strikes weren’t lawful orders, to which he repeated these were illegal killings “to all appearances.” 

TRUMP OVERSEEING ‘GOLDEN AGE’ OF WAR ON DRUGS

The Trump administration sent notice to Congress on Tuesday opposing a joint resolution introduced by Senate Democrats to stop U.S. military strikes on drug cartel boats in the Caribbean without congressional approval. The resolution faces little chance of passing in either the Senate or the House, with Republicans controlling both.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the most recent strike on a Venezuelan boat, saying the Pentagon has “tremendous confidence” in how it gathers information. He said the U.S. military does not strike boats without “100% certainty” of who and what is on board.