Lawmakers Plan to Launch Probe Into ‘Double-Tap’ Strike on Boat in Caribbean

Senators from both parties said on Monday that they want more information to determine whether the U.S. conducted an unlawful follow-up strike at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a boat suspected of trafficking drugs in the Caribbean.

The Washington Post reported last week that the Trump administration’s campaign included a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill everybody” in the early September boat strike, citing sources with “direct knowledge of the operation.” The immediate response from lawmakers, including some Republicans, has been to suggest that the follow-up strike, known as a “double tap,” may have been a war crime.

Now other lawmakers are joining in to call for an investigation.

“I’ve spoken to the secretary, I’ve spoken to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and we’re going to do a vigorous oversight of a very serious charge and find out if there’s anything to it,” Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Monday.

In the account by the Post, two people survived the initial strike and were left “clinging to the smoldering wreck.” The outlet said that Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley allegedly ordered the second strike in response to the directive reportedly given by Hegseth.

International humanitarian law prohibits targeting people who are wounded or unable to fight, leading some lawmakers to say that if the account is true, Hegseth may have committed a war crime. Hegseth dismissed the reporting as “fake” and “derogatory.”

But the Trump administration is facing bipartisan scrutiny.

Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, argued Monday that if the Trump administration is innocent, records from the incident should exonerate the officials involved.

“I think we’ll begin with briefings about what actually happened,” Reed said. “Hopefully they will make available the video of the entire sequence of activities of the first strike. And then I think it should be public, too, because the bottom line here is if they’ve done nothing wrong, then that video should exonerate them completely. Why don’t they release it?”

The Trump administration indicated to NOTUS that it would be amenable to providing information to Congress.

“Should the Armed Services Committee request drone footage of the strikes, we will reply directly to the requesters,” a Pentagon spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Since the initial reporting from The Washington Post, the White House has acknowledged that a second strike took place. But in a press briefing Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt vehemently refuted that Hegseth ordered the second strike, instead telling reporters that Bradley ordered the attack.

“And he was well within his authority to do so,” Leavitt said.

The focus among senators seems to now be on figuring out exactly what happened.

“I learned over the weekend that Oxford’s word of the year is ‘rage bait’,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told NOTUS. “So I’m trying to determine whether or not it’s rage bait. If it’s not, and if it’s accurate, obviously an ethical line has been crossed or a law has been broken, and we just need to get to the facts.”

Tillis’ response echoed that of both Democrats and Republicans who NOTUS spoke to.

“It’s unclear if Hegseth’s order — was it a single order that Adm. Bradley then followed with respect to strike two? Or did he give a specific order with respect to strike two? These are the questions that we need answered,” Sen. Tim Kaine, the Democrat who has forced two resolutions on war powers that would block unauthorized military action in Venezuela, said Monday. Kaine said he was planning on reintroducing the resolution again.

“We’re just looking at the timing about those, but we need to take these up, because since the votes were taken, that did gain some Republican support,” Kaine said. “The number of questions and concerns have dramatically escalated.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said it was Hegseth who “created the command environment” that made a follow-up strike almost inevitable and “they cannot make Adm. Bradley the fall guy here.”

“He directed that the strikes be lethal and kinetic, which signaled to everyone below him that these strikes were meant to kill everyone on the boat,” Blumenthal said. “So even if he didn’t issue the real-time order, he is responsible.”

Other Senate Republicans continued to stand by the Trump administration, as they have throughout the administration’s operations in the Caribbean.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Trump ally, said he was not concerned that a war crime had been committed.

“We don’t know what the circumstances were at all about this,” Mullin said. “I mean, was a boat still operative? Were they still trying to run? We don’t know what the circumstances are at all.”

Across the Capitol, House Armed Service Committee member Rep. Ro Khanna of California said Monday that he and Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, a member of the committee who has also expressed concerns about the strike, plan to team up to pursue a bipartisan investigation into the strike.

Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the committee, and Turner’s offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But Turner previously told CBS News that Congress is already looking into the incident. Khanna said that the committee is trying to find out “who gave the orders, who all was involved in the decision-making to strike these boats, who gave them the legal advice that they violate U.S. law.”

Khanna added that he and Turner were hoping for a bipartisan armed services hearing soon.

Over Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump told U.S. troops that strikes would expand from the sea to the land “very soon,” targeting drug networks inside Venezuela. Two days later he declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety,” a warning widely read as a signal something larger may be coming, though Trump later said not to “read anything into it.”

Last week the State Department formally designated the Cartel de los Soles — which U.S. officials claim is tied to the Venezuelan state — as a foreign terrorist organization. Hegseth said that classification “opens up a lot of new options.”

What began as a maritime operation has now grown into one of the largest U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean in decades: more than a dozen warships, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group, F-35 fighters, long-range bombers and about 15,000 personnel positioned around Venezuela.

Since early September, the U.S. has carried out at least 21 strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing more than 80 people the administration has said were “narco-terrorists,” though it has not publicly released evidence to substantiate those allegations.