A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Sheinbaum: ‘We Were Not Informed’
A rather unusual series of events over the past 48 hours has exposed the extent of the CIA’s involvement in counternarcotics operations in Mexico.
A brief timeline to catch you up:
Sunday: Four government investigators — two from Mexico and two from the United States — were killed around 2 a.m. local time in a car accident in the northern state of Chihuahua while viewing newly discovered drug labs, according to Mexican officials. A government convoy was navigating the rugged highlands of the Sierra Madre Occidental when the lead vehicle plunged about 200 meters down a cliff and caught fire, killing all four occupants, the NYT reported. The two Americans were “training officers assigned to the United States Embassy in Mexico,” according to the report.
Monday: The story took on a surprising new dimension when Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded an explanation for the operation in which the investigators were killed, the AP reported:
“It was not an operation that the security cabinet was aware of,” Sheinbaum told journalists. “We were not informed; it was a decision by the Chihuahua government.” She said they must have authorization from the federal government for such collaboration at the state level “as established by the Constitution.”
Adding to suspicions of something being afoot, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico declined to identify who the U.S. investigators were or which agency they worked for, saying only that they were “supporting Chihuahua state authorities’ efforts to combat cartel operations,” according to the AP.
Tuesday: The reasons for the initial secrecy and vagueness became clear when the WaPo reported this morning that the two dead U.S. investigators worked for the CIA “as part of a significantly expanded role in battling narcotics trafficking in the Western Hemisphere”:
The four died as they were returning from meeting with Mexican officials in the aftermath of the operation to dismantle a clandestine drug lab in a remote area. Chihuahua’s attorney general, César Jáuregui Moreno, told Mexico’s El Universal newspaper that the Americans did not directly participate in the Mexican raid on the lab, which he called “perhaps one of the largest ever located.”
Looming over the story is Mexico’s extreme sensitivity to historic U.S. violations of its sovereignty. So you have President Sheinbaum insisting that “there are no joint operations on land or in the air,” only sharing of information within a “well-established” legal framework. And you have the attorney general of Chihuahua rushing to offer assurances that Sheinbaum was not notified about the operation because the CIA personnel were only involved in training and not in the raid on the drug lab, which involved only Mexican agents:
He said the Americans, whose agency affiliation he did not identify, were doing training work “about eight to nine hours away” from the location of the operation against the drug lab. After that operation, they met with personnel from Chihuahua’s state investigation agency, known as AEI, which participated in the raid, Jáuregui told El Universal. The accident occurred hours later, he said.
The Trump administration doesn’t have a good track record of recognizing let alone abiding by these kinds of finely drawn lines, as evidenced by its lawless high seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. It has not offered its own account of the incident in Mexico.
Fishing Boat Crew Survived U.S. Strike
The crew of an Ecuadoran fishing boat recounts to The Guardian what they claim was a U.S. drone attack on their vessel on March 26, some 200 miles northwest of the Galápagos Islands. No one was killed in the attack, but several crew members were injured. After being rescued by what they described as a U.S. patrol boat, they were transferred to a Salvadoran patrol boat and eventually taken to El Salvador, where they were questioned at a military base before being repatriated to Ecuador.
Great Read
NYT: The Night the Government Closed the Skies Over El Paso
Headline of the Day
Another not-in-my-lifetime headline: “Japan lifts post-World War II ban on lethal weapons exports”
DC Grand Jury Involved in Brennan Case
While the “grand conspiracy” investigation of Trump investigators is anchored in southern Florida, a D.C. grand jury is involved CBS News reports:
Former senior intelligence and FBI officials who are cooperating with the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal probe into whether former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress were subpoenaed over the weekend to testify before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
Trump DOJ Targets SPLC
The Southern Poverty Law Center announced this morning that it is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Trump DOJ. It believes the probe is focused on its past use of paid informants to infiltrate right-wing extremist groups.
Extremism Is Also a Grift
WaPo: The far-right influencer Nick Fuentes has pocketed roughly $900,000 from superfans since the start of 2025.
TPM on the Radio
TPM’s Josh Kovensky was on Texas Public Radio’s Texas Matters to talk about his article on the GOP’s election year imperative to revive Islamophobia as a way of firing up its base:
Only the Best People
Scandal-tarred Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is resigning.
‘The Literary Find of a Lifetime’
A bound volume of original love letters from John Keats that was stolen from the Whitney estate sometime before 1989 has been recovered after a man showed up at a Manhattan rare books store last year trying to sell it.
The story is cinematic in its details, including the British-mystery-TV-show-style involvement of rare book dealers in getting their hands on the long-lost volume and alerting law enforcement.
I was also gratified to learn that there is an Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. I clearly missed my calling.
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