Key events
Republican-led committees launching probes
There’s been a swift response from lawmakers following the reports. Republican-led committees overseeing the Pentagon have vowed to conduct “vigorous oversight” into the boat strikes.
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Senate Armed Services Committee:“Has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances”.
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House Armed Services Committee: “Is taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question”.
And lawmakers on both sides, speaking on talk shows on Sunday, called for congressional review.
“This rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” said Democrat Senator Tim Kaine on CBS’s Face the Nation programme.
Republican lawmaker Mike Turner said Congress did not know yet if the report of the follow-up strike was true.
“Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” said Turner, a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Trump ‘wouldn’t have wanted’ second strike on Caribbean boat
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One yesterday, the president defended Hegseth, saying he believed his statement “100%” that he hadn’t ordered the second strike.
“I’m going to find out about it, but Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.”
When asked if he would have wanted a second attempt to kill the survivors, the president said:
We’ll look into it, but no, I wouldn’t have wanted that – not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal.”
The Washington Post reported that Hegseth “gave a spoken directive” to “kill everybody” on board in September. When there were still two men left after the first strike, a Special Operations commander ordered the follow-up to comply with Hegseth’s direction, the newspaper reported.
Hegseth has strongly denied the report, calling it “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory”.
He also said the US’s strikes on boats so far in the Caribbean had been “lawful under both US and international law.”
Welcome: Trump backs Hegseth amid report of repeated strike on boat
Good morning and welcome to our US Politics live blog.
We’re straight back in the thick of it after Thanksgiving: lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are demanding answers from the Trump administration after reports Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth ordered a double-tap strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing two people on board who had survived the first blast.
The allegations, first reported in the Washington Post on Friday, have sparked calls from Congress for an immediate investigation.
Hegseth, who calls himself the Secretary for War on X, has called it “fake news” and President Trump says he believes him.
But Congress is alarmed. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers raised concerns on the weekend that if the reports were true, such attacks would be war crimes.
