Republican-led committees are launching investigations.
There has been a strong reaction from MPs following the reports. Republican-led committees that oversee the Pentagon have vowed to conduct “rigorous monitoring” of the boat attacks.
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Senate Armed Services Committee:”The Department has directed an investigation, and we will conduct a vigorous investigation to determine the facts surrounding these circumstances.”
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House Armed Services Committee: “Taking bipartisan action to gather full accounting of related operations”.
And lawmakers from both parties, speaking on talk shows on Sunday, called for a congressional review.
“If that’s true, it rises to the level of a war crime,” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said on CBS’s Face the Nation program.
Republican Congressman Mike Turner said Congress did not yet know whether reports of a follow-up strike were true.
“Obviously if that happened, it would be very serious, and I agree it would be an illegal act,” said Turner, the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Trump may not want another attack on a Caribbean boat
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One yesterday, the President defended Hegseth, saying he had “100%” confidence in his statement that he did not order the second attack.
“I’m going to find out about it, but Pete said he didn’t order the deaths of those two men.”
Asked whether he would have wanted a second attempt to kill the survivors, the President said:
We’ll look into it, but no, I don’t want that – not another attack. The first attack was very fatal.”
The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had “given a verbal instruction” in September to “kill everyone” on board. According to newspaper reports, when there were still two men left after the first attack, a special operations commander ordered a follow-up operation to follow Hegseth’s direction.
Hegseth strongly denied the report, calling it “fabricated, inflammatory and defamatory”.
He also said that US attacks on boats in the Caribbean so far were “lawful under both US and international law”.
Welcome: Trump backs Hegseth amid reports of repeated attacks on boat
Good morning and welcome to our American politics live blog.
We’re straight into it after Thanksgiving: Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are demanding answers from the Trump administration after reports that Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth ordered a double-tap attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing two people on the boat who initially survived the explosion.
Congress has called for an immediate investigation after the allegations were first reported in The Washington Post on Friday.
Hegseth, who calls himself Secretary of War on X, has called it “fake news” and President Trump says he believes him.
But Congress is nervous. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers expressed concern over the weekend that if the reports are true, such attacks would constitute war crimes.
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