The top Republican and the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said on Friday that the Pentagon had refused for weeks to share with Congress key information about its strikes on marine vessels that the Trump administration says are carrying drugs, despite repeated requests from top lawmakers that it divulge the directives initiating the operation as well as its legal justification.
In a brief statement on Friday, Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the panel, and Senator Jack Reed, the senior Democrat, made public two letters that they jointly sent to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the past several weeks requesting the information.
“To date, these documents have not been submitted,” Mr. Wicker and Mr. Reed wrote.
The senators’ decision to publicize their requests and Mr. Hegseth’s failure to meet them reflected growing bipartisan alarm on Capitol Hill about President Trump’s expanding and open-ended military campaign, undertaken without consultation with or approval by Congress. The decision also reflected deepening frustration with the administration’s lack of transparency about an operation whose legal justification is in question.
The senators shared two separate requests made to the Pentagon. In one letter, in late September, they asked for a copy of the president’s orders to carry out the military strikes. By law, that letter noted, the Pentagon is required to provide Congress with copies of “execute orders” within 15 days of the president’s issuing of them, a deadline the senators said the Trump administration had missed.
In a second letter, in early October, they again sought the execute orders, as well as the Justice Department’s legal justification for the attacks and a “complete list” of designated terrorist organizations and drug trafficking organizations “with whom the president has determined the United States is in a noninternational armed conflict and against whom lethal military force may be used.” Top House Democrats sent a similar request earlier this month for the list of targets but have not received any information from the White House.
Mr. Trump has sought to justify strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels by designating certain cartels as terrorist organizations.
The senators’ announcement on Friday came amid rising concern in both parties over the Trump administration’s failure to follow the law to inform Congress about the president’s escalating military campaign against drug traffickers off the coast of Central and South America.
A decision to exclude Senate Democrats from a briefing on Wednesday on the strikes, which so far have killed at least 61 people, drew ire from both sides of the aisle. Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, told reporters he spoke with the White House after the briefing and said the Senate had always worked on a bipartisan basis when it came to matters of defense and national security.
“We want to keep it that way,” said Mr. Rounds, a member of the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee.
House lawmakers in a classified briefing on Thursday asked Pentagon officials for bipartisan access to the legal memo justifying the strikes but were not given a specific answer as to when the administration would give that to Congress. Military legal experts were meant to brief lawmakers in that closed-door meeting, but the administration opted at the last minute not to send them, and offered no explanation why.
“I’m walking away without an understanding of how and why they’re making an assessment that the use of lethal force is adequate here,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, said as he exited that briefing.
Mr. Crow, a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and a former Army Ranger, stressed the importance of congressional oversight on U.S. military action abroad. “I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “Our country spent over 20 years, $3 trillion, thousands of American lives, using tactics and strikes against terrorists. And most of that ended up poorly.”
U.S. officials have said that the military has identified potential targets inside Venezuela, should Mr. Trump decide to expand the Pentagon’s maritime campaign against the purported drug traffickers to land.
But on Friday, Mr. Trump indicated that he had not made any decisions about such an escalation. As the president headed to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, reporters aboard Air Force One asked him directly if he was weighing whether to attack military sites in Venezuela. He replied, “No, it’s not true.”
The Pentagon has ordered an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, to the region, but it will take several weeks for it to reach the Caribbean. The military is likely to hold off on any potential escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking until the arrival of the Ford, which when fully staffed carries around 5,000 sailors.
Robert Jimison contributed reporting.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
The post Top Senators Say Pentagon Has Not Shared Legal Justification for Boat Strikes appeared first on New York Times.
