President Donald Trump on Monday said he will let Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decide whether to release the full video of a controversial military strike on alleged drug smugglers off the coast of Venezuela, backing away from comments last week when he said that “whatever” footage the Pentagon possesses “we’d certainly release, no problem.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump denied saying Wednesday that he was open to releasing the video — despite doing so on camera — and then attacked the journalist who asked him about his previous comments, calling her “fake news.”
“I didn’t say that. You said that,” Trump said, before adding: “Whatever Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.”
The comments came as the administration struggles to shake off scrutiny of a Sept. 2 operation in which elite Special Operations forces attacked a boat carrying 11 people and then struck again after determining there two survivors among the wreckage. The incident, first reported by The Washington Post late last month, has raised questions among Democrats and law of war experts about whether the men’s killing may constitute a war crime.
Hegseth, speaking Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, declined to commit to releasing the video despite Trump’s earlier comments.
“We are reviewing the process, and we’ll see,” Hegseth said, voicing a desire to protect future operations of a similar kind. Spokespeople for the secretary could not immediately be reached for comment Monday.
Lawmakers have demanded the release of all related video, including footage shown to select lawmakers last week when Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander who oversaw the operation, was summoned to Capitol Hill to discuss his decision-making.
In language of its new defense policy bill, released Sunday, lawmakers called for “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to be released to members of the armed services committees and for a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget to be withheld if the defense secretary continues to withhold the footage. That news was reported earlier by Politico.
Administration officials have defended the Sept. 2 strike, comparing the action at sea to strikes in years past against militants in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. Hegseth, speaking Saturday, called the secondary strike a “reattack” and said that while Bradley ordered the action, he agreed with the call.
Legal experts and Democrats have questioned that argument, saying that recent strikes at sea do not come with the same congressional authorization of military force and that killing a shipwrecked combatant at sea is considered a violation of the law of armed conflict.
The Sept. 2 strike was the first that the Pentagon has carried out, killing more than 85 people. Hegseth, in his remarks Saturday, said the strikes will continue.
The targets, he said, “are the al-Qaeda of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaeda. We are tracking them, we are killing them, and we will keep killing them so long as they are poisoning [American citizens] with narcotics.”
Hegseth said that the drugs are “tantamount to chemical weapons.”
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