The Most Dangerous Six Words In Washington Right Now: "Trust Us, We've Got This Handled"
A Subscribers-Only Briefing On What The CIA Is Doing In Mexico, What Congress Probably Doesn't Know, And Why "It Can't Happen Here" Is About To Get A Very Expensive Education
The Most Dangerous Six Words In Washington Right Now: "Trust Us, We've Got This Handled"
A Paid-Subscribers-Only Briefing On What The CIA Is Doing In Mexico, What Congress Probably Doesn't Know, And Why "It Can't Happen Here" Is About To Get A Very Expensive Education
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #896: Tuesday, May 12th, 2026
Look…I’ll start with something that’s going to make a lot of you uncomfortable, and I don’t particularly care, because comfortable is how we got here.
The CIA is killing people inside Mexico.
Not “providing intelligence.” Not “supporting partner forces.” Not the laundered, dry-cleaned language government press offices use when they don’t want you to understand what happened.
I mean Agency officers, on the ground…in a country we are not at war with… participating directly in killing human beings. Some were probably bad guys. Some were almost certainly somebody’s bad guys.
And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:
Nobody told you. Nobody asked you. And…the part that ought to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up…there’s a very real chance nobody told Congress either.
You found out from CNN. On a Tuesday. In May. That’s not how a republic works. That’s how a banana republic works. And if the distinction feels academic…I promise, by the end of this letter, it won’t.
What Actually Happened (The Short Version You Won’t Get From Cable News)
Here’s the timeline, stripped of the diplomatic dance music:
Day One of Term Two:
Trump designates the Sinaloa…Jalisco New Generation…and Nueva Familia Michoacána cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Sounds tough. Hold that thought.
Spring 2025:
CIA Director John Ratcliffe quietly begins “reviewing legal options” for lethal force against cartels. In English: lawyers figuring out how to make the killing legal before it starts.
October 2025:
Trump signs a classified directive expanding CIA authority for lethal targeting and covert action in Latin America.
Late 2025 through Spring 2026:
CIA Ground Branch…the Agency’s elite paramilitary unit…begins operating inside Mexico. Plain clothes. Faces covered. Working with select state and local Mexican officials. Sometimes without telling Mexico City. Sometimes…apparently…without telling the President of Mexico.
March 28, 2026:
A car explodes on a Mexican highway in broad daylight outside the capital. Inside: mid-level Sinaloa operative Francisco “El Payin” Beltran and his driver. Both dead. CNN’s sources say CIA operations officers facilitated the hit.
Late April 2026:
Two CIA officers die in a car accident in Chihuahua after a raid on a meth lab. President Claudia Sheinbaum says she didn’t authorize the Americans being there. She is, to use the technical term, furious.
May 12, 2026 (yesterday):
CNN publishes. The CIA declines to comment. Mexico “categorically rejects” any version normalizing covert foreign operations on its soil.
Trump, meanwhile, told a crowd last week…on a stage, cameras rolling…that “we’ve started the land force.” If Mexico won’t do the job, “we’re going to do the job.”
Pause. Breathe. Ask the question nobody in the briefing rooms wants to ask:
Where was Congress in all of this?
The Law That’s Supposed To Stop This — And Probably Isn’t
Here’s a quick civics refresher, because the public schools didn’t give you one and the cable news anchors are too busy yelling to bother:
After Vietnam. After Watergate. After the Church Committee discovered the CIA had spent two decades trying to assassinate foreign leaders…dosing Americans with LSD without consent…opening domestic mail…and running operations Congress had never heard of…the country built a legal cage around the Agency.
That cage has two doors.
Door One:
Executive Order 12333, signed by Reagan in 1981, prohibits assassination. Flat-out. No asterisks. No fine print.
Door Two:
The National Security Act, as amended by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980. For any covert action…activity meant to influence conditions abroad where the U.S. role isn’t intended to be apparent…the President must sign a written “Finding,” and Congress must be notified. Not eventually. Not at the President’s convenience. Notified.
Notification goes to the “Gang of Eight”: the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House…the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate…and the chairs and ranking members of the two intelligence committees.
Eight people. That’s it. And even that floor-level bar is what the post-Watergate generation considered the minimum a democracy could tolerate.
So here’s the question ringing in my ears since I read the CNN piece, and which ought to be ringing in yours:
Did the Gang of Eight get briefed?
If they did…fine. You can argue this is bad policy, reckless, going to get Americans killed in retaliation (which multiple CNN sources said is a real concern). But you cannot argue the constitutional system was bypassed.
If they didn’t…and the CNN reporting is conspicuously silent on this point…which is itself a tell…then what we’re looking at is not aggressive policy.
It is the deliberate construction of a parallel lethal authority…operating outside the only oversight mechanism the American people have.
And…here’s what nobody in Washington wants to admit: the silence is the answer.
When a story like this breaks and not one Senator…Representative…staffer…or leaker comes out within 24 hours saying “we were briefed, here’s the context”…that absence is screaming.
Which brings us to the trick they're running to make all of this legal…and why it should terrify you regardless of which team you root for. That part is for paid subscribers.
