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As the Trump administration continues military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, several Republican lawmakers are ramping up scrutiny on the administration over a double strike in early September.
The strikes on suspected drug boats from Venezuela have drawn pushback from both parties – in particular, the second strike on a single boat to kill remaining survivors. The Washington Post reported that the order for a second strike came from defense secretary Pete Hegseth, which Hegseth has denied.
At Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth reaffirmed that the decorated US navy admiral Frank Bradley ultimately “sunk the boat and eliminated the threat”. Hegseth said that while he “watched that first strike”, he did not “stick around for the hour or two hours” after.
Congress is now getting involved. Bradley is due to sit with top lawmakers on both the House and Senate armed services committees for a classified briefing on Thursday about the events of 2 September.
“Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
Republican senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said he wasn’t convinced by the administration’s explanation of the second strike. “In this sense, it looks like they’re trying to pin the blame on someone else,” Paul told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday evening. He cited the shifting explanations given by Hegseth and the White House.
“On Sunday, Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this, and it did not happen,” Paul added. “And then the next day, from the podium at the White House, are saying it did happen. So, either he was lying to us on Sunday, or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”
Meanwhile, Republican senator Jim Justice of West Virginia said in an interview with MS Now that a “two blow” operation made him “uncomfortable”. He added that if the Pentagon did order a strike to kill survivors on the boat it would be “unacceptable”.
For his part, Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate armed services committee, said that members would conduct “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances” in a statement last week.
Some lawmakers, including Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the committee, have also called on the administration to release video footage of the second strike. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, then that video should exonerate them completely. Why don’t they release it?” Reed said.
Outgoing North Carolina senator Thom Tillis also said the second strike “was a violation of ethical, moral and legal code”, as he told CNN.
“If the facts play out the way they’re currently being reported, then somebody needs to get the hell out of Washington,” he said. “Whoever that is, is the person who made the decision and we can be connived that it was isolated to that one person. Anybody in the chain of command that was responsible for it, that had vision of it, needs to be held accountable.”
Tillis cast a deciding vote to confirm Hegseth in January, a move that he’s since expressed regret over. “With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization,” the retiring Republican said in an interview with CNN in July.
Coming to Hegseth’s defense amid the scrutiny, Republican senator Roger Marshall of Kansas said that he stood behind the Pentagon chief. “This is a war, and it’s ugly. War is never pretty. I want to gather all the facts,” he told MS Now’s Morning Joe. “Let’s gather the facts, but let’s not pronounce judgment here.”
Marshall went on to defend the strikes writ large: “We’re losing a couple hundred Americans every day to this drug poisoning, and I think that these strikes are slowing down the import of those deadly, deadly drugs.”
