A nugget in John Bolton's book may explain a war powers q that arose in 2018 after Trump's strike on Syria: what was the admin legal team's analysis for how it complied with international legal constraints on using force? Their thinking consisted of "LOL." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/us/politics/trump-war-powers-syria-congress.html

After Trump's similar 2017 strike on Syrian forces for using chemical weapons, @protctdemocracy had sued under FOIA to get the legal reasoning to the extent the Trump admin legal team had bothered to put one together. /2 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/world/middleeast/syria-united-protect-democracy-trump-lawsuit.html

The lawsuit revealed that on the day of the strike, the Trump legal team had circulated an unsigned, 7 page memo, but not what it said. /3 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4116868-20170922-DOJ-Civil-Vaughn-Index.html

In June 2018 - two months after the second such strike - the Trump DOJ released a 22-page memo by Trump's OLC head Steve Engel laying out a rationale for why the second strike was lawful despite lack of Congressional authorization. /4
https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/file/1067551/download

The memo mentioned that Engel had earlier given this advice to then-White House Counsel Don McGahn orally./5

Engel's reasoning was that as a matter of domestic law, Trump could unilaterally attack another country if he decided that doing so was in the national interest. Whatever the merits of this, Engel was silent on the separate international law question. /6 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/us/politics/trump-war-powers-syria-congress.html

Bolton's book makes pretty clear that the Trump admin didn't take legal analysis seriously anyway. Rather than deciding which options were legal 1st & then deciding which to do, their process was to decide what to do & then McGahn would write a memo opining that it was legal. /7

But at least they bothered to produce something acknowledging that domestic constitutional law is a thing. Not even coming up with a half-hearted take addressing the international law of war, like the Clinton admin did in 1999 with the Kosovo intervention, is striking. /end