Democrats say Hegseth balked at call for full video of boat strike

ERIC LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth arrives at a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. Hegseth briefed congressional leaders on Tuesday about the monthslong military campaign targeting people suspected of being drug traffickers at sea.

WASHINGTON >> Democratic lawmakers said Tuesday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a classified briefing, declined to commit to showing the full Congress unedited video of the U.S. military’s attack on a boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2.

The attack, which included a follow-up strike that killed two survivors, has been the subject of intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill and among military experts, who have raised questions about its legality.

“His answer: We have to study it,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said of Hegseth’s response Tuesday. “Well, in my view, they’ve studied it long enough.”

Schumer added: “Congress ought to be able to see it.”

The closed-door discussion also included Secretary of State Marco Rubio; John Ratcliffe, the CIA director; and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It mostly centered on the 22 known boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that the Trump administration has carried out since early September, according to a U.S. official briefed on the meeting. The attacks have killed at least 87 people.

Hegseth and the other top officials provided no information on possible land strikes in Venezuela, and there was no discussion of any effort to replace the leadership in the country, according to the official.

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The meeting, in which administration officials briefed congressional leaders and the top members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, was “very unsatisfying,” Schumer added.

The Pentagon has said that because President Donald Trump designated certain drug cartels as terrorist organizations, the military can target boats that the administration says are trafficking narcotics as though they are war combatants. But lawmakers, particularly Democrats, are wary of that legal rationale.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said after the briefing Tuesday that he had asked top military officials to provide key documents related to the strikes. He said that he wanted to see the so-called after-action report on the Sept. 2 strike and the legal opinion underlying the open-ended military campaign, and to determine whether that opinion “was in any way changed after the Sept. 2 attack.”

The annual defense policy bill, on track to clear Congress in the coming days, includes bipartisan language intended to force the Pentagon to hand over the command orders that initiated the strikes — and the full, unedited videos of them — to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

The provision in the must-pass bill “shows that both Republicans and Democrats” are concerned about the Pentagon’s transparency around the operation, said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services panel.

Some Republicans have defended the strikes, saying the Pentagon has been eliminating traffickers ferrying drugs that kill Americans. But the Pentagon has told lawmakers it is targeting boats with known cargos of cocaine, something that Warner highlighted Tuesday.

“We’re not talking about fentanyl,” he said after the briefing. “Let’s be clear, that is still — that comes into Mexico. That is the item that kills the most Americans. This is about cocaine.”

Adm. Alvin Holsey, the military commander who initially oversaw the Pentagon’s attacks against the suspected drug boats, also briefed top lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Tuesday.

“We got some clarity on the chain of command and who made decisions at what point, but on the legality of it we didn’t get a lot of clarity,” said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House panel.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the Special Operations commander who oversaw the attack, is expected to return to Capitol Hill next week to brief the House Armed Services Committee. He spoke with lawmakers last week, along with General Caine, in a closed-door meeting in which a handful of members of Congress viewed the Sept. 2 strike video.

Smith added Tuesday that it was “pretty clear” that the follow-up strike Sept. 2 was “Admiral Bradley’s call, based on the rules of engagement given to him by Hegseth.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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