Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced scrutiny on two fronts Thursday: lawmakers pressed for answers about the Sept. 2 strike on survivors aboard an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, and a Pentagon watchdog faulted him for using the Signal messaging app to discuss a U.S. attack on Yemen.
Behind-closed-doors briefings with Navy Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the Special Operations commander who oversaw the operation, included video of the boat strike. Leading Democrats said they were shocked by what they saw. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., called it “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” saying the footage showed “two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.” Himes cited the DOD manual’s example that attacking a shipwreck is impermissible, saying viewers would see U.S. forces attacking shipwrecked sailors.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who sits on the Armed Services Committee, described the video differently, saying it showed “two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight.” Cotton said multiple strikes occurred minutes apart and called the operations “entirely lawful,” adding he did not see anything disturbing.
The briefings added detail to an operation that has prompted legal and ethical questions, including from military experts, about whether the strikes complied with U.S. law or could amount to war crimes under the administration’s framing of a war on narcotraffickers.
When asked about the operation at a Cabinet meeting, President Trump said he didn’t know about the second strike. “I didn’t know anything about people,” he said. “I wasn’t involved in it.” Hegseth said he did not authorize subsequent strikes after approving the initial strike but defended sinking the boat and Bradley’s decisions. “I watched that first strike live,” Hegseth said. “As you can imagine, the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I moved on to my next meeting.”
Bradley told lawmakers he was under no order to kill everyone on board, according to both Cotton and Himes. Lawmakers, however, are pressing for greater transparency. Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he still had “serious questions about the legality of all the strikes” off the coast of Venezuela and urged strict adherence to the rules of war to protect U.S. service members. Reed and other Democrats have asked the administration to release the full video. Trump said he would be willing to release footage but was unsure what had been recorded, and defended the campaign as reducing drug flow into the U.S., claiming, “Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.”
Separately, the Pentagon Inspector General released an 84-page report finding Hegseth violated agency policy by using the encrypted app Signal on his personal phone to discuss U.S. airstrikes in Yemen earlier this year. The probe, led by Inspector General Steven Stebbins, followed a request from top members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and was prompted by a March report that a journalist had been added to a Signal group chat where officials discussed plans to strike Houthi rebels.
The report concluded Hegseth shared highly sensitive military plans over an unapproved, unsecured commercial network, sending nonpublic DoD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory roughly two to four hours before the strikes. It warned that using a personal phone and Signal for official business risked compromising sensitive information and could harm DoD personnel and mission objectives.
Hegseth declined to be interviewed for the investigation, providing a written statement asserting the information he shared did not require classification. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said ahead of the report’s release that the findings “are a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and prove what we knew all along — no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved, and the case is closed.”
NPR disclosure: Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation.
Sam Gringlas, Gabriel Sanchez and Deirdre Walsh contributed reporting.