Washington DC - President Donald Trump's Justice Department reportedly produced a classified legal opinion which would permit more deadly strikes against people accused of being drug traffickers.

Per CNN, the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel produced a legal opinion which argues that President Donald Trump is allowed to authorize deadly force against cartels and traffickers based on their threat to US security.

In addition, it provided a classified list of cartels and organizations that the federal government is allowed to strike even outside of US territory. This list goes beyond those that Trump has designated "terrorist organizations."

Legal experts warned that this amounted to creating a secret list of groups whose supposed members can now be summarily killed without legal review, and that it gave the president almost unlimited authority to essentially wage war.

US politics Venezuela claims to have uncovered "false flag" explosives plot at US embassy

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday refused to comment on the OLC opinion and said that she wouldn't release legal advice that her department had provided to the White House.

"I'm not going to discuss any legal advice that my department may, or may not, have given or issued at the direction of the president on this matter," Bondi told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Trump has ordered multiple of strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela over recent weeks, claiming with no evidence that they were carrying drugs to the US.

As multiple analyses have argued, the attacks could be classed as murder, since those killed were not combatants in a war and were in effect executed with no legal recourse.