Defense Department is reviewing boat strike video for possible release, Hegseth says

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Defense Department is reviewing the video of several Sept. 2 strikes against an alleged drug boat off the Venezuela coast to determine whether it will be released to the public.

The Sept. 2 attack and the decisions that led to it have come under growing scrutiny by lawmakers in recent days, prompting calls for the footage to be made public. But Hegseth says national security officials first must determine whether revealing the video could endanger ongoing operations.

“We’ve got operators out there doing this right now, so whatever we were to decide to release, we would have to be very responsible about, so we’re reviewing that right now,” he said Saturday during an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.

President Trump previously said he would be willing to release the full video, but that he didn’t know what it included.

Democrats and some Republicans have grown frustrated with the administration for its campaign of boat strikes in the Caribbean conducted without Congressional approval. In the Sept. 2 strikes, the military conducted a second strike on several crew members who had survived the initial attack, leading to criticism that the Trump administration had killed people who no longer posed a threat. Hegseth has said he authorized the first strike, but that military commander Adm. Frank M. Bradley approved the second.

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was among the lawmakers who saw the video last week in a briefing with Bradley. Himes told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that even if Americans support the administration’s stated goal of thwarting drug trafficking, they deserve to see how it’s being done.

“There’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners,” Himes said, “but I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under, just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing.”

Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that he would “err on the side of transparency” when it came to the decision to release the footage.

“I haven’t seen it, so I really don’t know what’s classified and what’s not. But I just feel like, let’s err on the side of transparency,” he said.

Saying that Americans liked to make decisions based on facts, Curtis added that “the more we can give them that information, the more comfortable they’re going to feel, and that’s actually one of the ways we’re going to restore trust in government.”

Trump has had increasingly harsh words for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump has accused of being complicit in drug trafficking. The Venezuelan government has in turn criticized U.S. military operations in the region, and on Saturday the country’s army swore in 5,600 new soldiers as the Caribbean nation faces growing pressure from the Trump administration, AFP reported.

Still, Trump administration officials including Hegseth have continued to defend the military campaign against boats in the Caribbean allegedly moving drugs to the United States.

“President Trump can and will take decisive military action as he sees fit to defend our nation’s interests,” Hegseth said Saturday. “Let no country on earth doubt that for a moment.”