Trump and Hegseth insist they didn’t know of follow-up strike that killed survivors on suspected drug boat

By Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday sought to distance themselves from the decision to launch a follow-up strike on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean, insisting they weren’t aware of what the military had done after the first strike didn’t kill everyone on board.

During a Cabinet meeting, Trump told reporters that he was not consulted ahead of time, and that even months after the strikes, he had not yet been fully briefed on the circumstances surrounding them.

“I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about the people,” he said. “I wasn’t involved, and I knew they took out a boat, but I would say this, they had a strike.”

Trump added that he was relying on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to keep him apprised of the situation, and that Hegseth was “satisfied” with the September attack.

But Hegseth on Tuesday also denied any direct role in targeting the survivors, saying he’d empowered Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley to make all of the operational decisions — and had left the room well before it became clear that some of the people on the boat had survived.

“I watched that first strike live,” Hegseth said. “I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting.”

The defense secretary did not learn about the second strike, he added, until hours later.

Both Trump and Hegseth defended Bradley’s actions as correct and within the administration’s legal authority, with Hegseth vowing that the administration would “have his back.”

“President Trump has empowered commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night,” he said.

But the efforts to place responsibility for the second strike solely on Bradley, the commander of US Special Operations Command, come amid intensifying scrutiny from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over the legality of the strike. Some have even suggested that it amounts to a war crime. And Trump has said previously he “wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”

Hegseth’s account on Tuesday also raised questions about his initial description of the strike in its immediate aftermath, when he said on Fox News that “I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing.”

GOP Sen. Roger Wicker, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, has pledged “vigorous oversight” of the decision-making following initial reporting from The Washington Post and CNN that the military had killed survivors in a follow-up strike on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean in September. The committee has since demanded the full audio and video of the attack as part of its investigation.

Democrats have long criticized the administration’s operations in the Caribbean as reckless and unwarranted, arguing that Trump has overstated the threat posed by the alleged drug vessels and offered little evidence that any of the dozens killed in the strikes so far warranted such action.

But the decision to launch a second strike on survivors prompted a broader, bipartisan swath of lawmakers to call for oversight and accountability over the incident. Several have warned that such actions would go beyond what they view as the acceptable bounds of the administration’s offensive in the Caribbean.

Some alleged, too, the administration was not being forthcoming. Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee told CNN’s Dana Bash, “I’m very suspicious that they’ve never shared that tape with us and that they are consciously trying to cover up what took place.”

Trump on Tuesday repeatedly defended his administration’s overall operations in the Caribbean as necessary to counter drug traffickers, even as he professed ignorance about the particulars of the September strike.

The president also signaled he planned to soon authorize strikes on targets inside of Venezuela, a move that would represent a significant escalation of an offensive that has for now been confined to international waters.

“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land too,” Trump said, adding that it would be “much easier” to target alleged traffickers within the country and refusing to rule out targeting people in other countries if the administration determined they were trafficking drugs into the US.

Hegseth — who initially derided the reports of a follow-up strike as “fake” before the administration officially acknowledged that it occurred — lashed out again Tuesday at reporting of the decision-making, calling scrutiny of the second strike “really irresponsible.”

But he quickly made clear again that when it came down to it, the decision was not his.

“I did not personally see survivors, because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke,” Hegseth said. “This is called the fog of war.”

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