The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee said surveillance video of U.S. strikes on an alleged drug-trafficking vessel in the Caribbean on Sept. 2 would contradict Republicans’ descriptions of the incident.
Rep. Adam Smith, who viewed the footage, said the survivors “weren’t trying to flip the boat over. The boat was clearly incapacitated. A tiny portion of it remained, capsized, the bow of the boat. They had no communications device. Certainly, they were unarmed.” He added that “any claim that the drugs had somehow survived that attack is hard, hard to really square with what we saw.”
Smith called the video “deeply disturbing” and said it “did not appear that these two survivors were in any position to continue the fight.” He urged the administration to release the video, saying doing so would show “everything that the Republicans are saying will clearly be portrayed to be completely false.” Smith described the boat as adrift and the men as trying to survive, not regroup and continue operations.
That account conflicts with remarks by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who also viewed the footage. Cotton said he had “no doubt” about the strike’s legality and described seeing “two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight.” Hegseth told attendees at the Reagan National Defense Forum he had been told a reattack was necessary because “there were a couple folks who could still be in the fight. Access to radios. There was a link up point of another potential boat, drugs were still there. They were actively interacting with them.”
Smith disputed Hegseth’s account: “That’s ridiculous. There are no radios,” he said on ABC’s This Week.
President Trump has said the administration would have “no problem” releasing the video, but Hegseth was cautious, saying any release would have to be handled responsibly and was under review.
Smith argued the footage shown to lawmakers is comparable to other strike videos the administration has publicly released and suggested reluctance to publish it stems from difficulty justifying the strike. “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify,” he said.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who has not seen the tape, defended the administration’s actions on This Week, arguing the cartels have moved to the high seas and that the president is exercising Article II powers. “No serious legal expert would doubt that the president has authority to blow narco-terrorists out of the water,” Schmitt said, noting Trump’s designation of certain groups as terrorist organizations and saying he reviewed a 40-plus page memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and that judge advocates were involved in strike briefings. The OLC opinion has not been made public; Democrats have called for its release.
The legality of targeting vessels suspected of carrying drugs has been a central debate. Smith warned that treating anyone intending to illegally transport drugs to the U.S. as a lawful target for deadly force grants the president unprecedented power and should concern Americans.
The conversation on This Week also touched on Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted in the U.S. in 2024 on drug and weapons trafficking charges. Schmitt declined to weigh in on the pardon, saying he was not familiar with the facts and asserting that criticism of Trump as soft on drug smuggling was “totally ridiculous,” pointing to the administration’s border and military actions.
Smith, however, suggested the pardon fits with a broader White House effort to assert dominance in the Western Hemisphere and to influence regional politics, saying the move appeared tied to electoral dynamics in Honduras rather than a straightforward anti-drug strategy. He emphasized that drugs remain a major problem in the United States even as he criticized the administration’s methods and legal rationale.