National-security-law experts worry that guidance from the military’s top legal minds is being ignored by the Trump administration, which is pushing troops into new legal territory with deployments to U.S. cities and strikes on alleged drug-runners abroad.

"One of the things I fear might be happening here is that the judge advocates in this instance may be providing proper means and methods advice, but I sense that the administration has gone to the Department of Justice and asked the Office of Legal Counsel to override whatever advice is being given by the judge advocates,” James Baker, a law professor at Syracuse University and former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, said Wednesday during a Center for a New American Security event .

Baker and James McPhe

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