In Barr’s view, however, sending American soldiers to “arrest” Noriega—notwithstanding the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the military for law enforcement without congressional approval—was “a justifiable defensive act by the United States.” Barr, who served as attorney general for about a year at the end of the first Bush administration, likens drug trafficking to terrorism, saying it is “really a national security issue.”

That comparison is alarming, because Barr has criticized relying on a law enforcement model, with its cumbersome protections for privacy and due process, to fight terrorism, which he sees as an act of war. Furthermore, he argues that “the Constitution vests the broadest possible defense powers in the president,” such that “no foreign threat can arise that the Constitution does not empower the President to meet and defeat.”

The implication is that the president has a free hand to treat drug traffickers as combatants, possibly meaning they can be assassinated at will rather than arrested and tried. “Using the military in drugs was always under discussion,” Barr said in a 2001 interview about his experiences in the Bush administration. “The best thing to do is not to extradite Pablo Escobar and bring him to the United States and try him. That’s not the most effective way of destroying that organization.”