Top Military Commander Showed Lawmakers Boat Strike Video—and It’s Bad

Lawmakers were shocked and appalled Thursday after they were shown video footage of the September 2 double tap that killed two survivors of an airstrike in the Caribbean.

Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley met behind closed doors with members of the House and Senate in an attempt to defend the Trump administration’s decision to slaughter two individuals who clung to the wreckage of their boat. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine was also in attendance at the meeting.

Ahead of the meeting, military attorneys claimed that there could be a legitimate explanation for the second strike if Bradley was able to prove the survivors posed a credible threat to U.S. military personnel. But the footage supposedly left no room for doubt that that was not the case.

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

Himes added that, based on his understanding of the Pentagon’s explanation, the survivors were “not in the position to continue their mission in any way.” He noted that Bradley had “confirmed that there had not been a kill them all order, and that there was not an order to grant no quarter,” according to CBS News.

Senator Jack Reed was similarly upset by the classified briefing, telling reporters in a statement that he was “deeply disturbed” by what he saw.

“This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be the only beginning of our investigation into this incident,” Reed wrote, adding that the Defense Department must release the “complete, unedited footage” of the airstrike.

Even Republican Senator Rand Paul was incensed by the footage and demanded that it be released. “I think if the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this,” he told The Independent reporter Eric Michael Garcia.

He also demanded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testify before Congress, and even called out some of his colleagues’ reticence to do anything about the strikes. “I think that Congress, if they had any kind of gumption at all would not be allowed administration to summarily execute people that are suspected of a crime,” he said.

But not everyone that attended the briefing seemed to walk away with the same understanding. Despite the clarified details, Republican Senator Tom Cotton argued that “the first strike, the second strike, and the third and the fourth strike on September 2nd  were entirely lawful and needful,” and that the sequential attacks were “exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do.”

Since early September, the United States has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean Sea that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.” The needless deaths have also pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

Donald Trump, however, is still backing Hegseth. The president has so far brushed off the widespread anger at his Defense Department pick, telling inquiring reporters Wednesday that “this is war.”

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump has given a full and unconditional pardon to entertainment executive Tim Leiweke—whom his own Justice Department indicted on charges of “orchestrating a conspiracy to rig the bidding process for an arena at a public university” in Austin.

The pardon is dated Tuesday.

Leiweke was charged in July of this year. “As outlined in the indictment, the Defendant rigged a bidding process to benefit his own company and deprived a public university and taxpayers of the benefits of competitive bidding,” assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater said at the time. Leiweke faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine. He pleaded not guilty.

In a statement following Trump’s pardon, Leiweke said, “This has been a long and difficult journey for my wife, my daughter, and me. The President has given us a new lease on life with which we will be grateful and good stewards.”

This comes alongside Trump’s pardon for Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, whom the Biden Justice Department previously charged with allegedly accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan’s government and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.

Cuellar’s and Leiweke’s pardons show that Trump has no qualms about white-collar crime. He may not even see it as a legitimate crime at all. He pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road CEO who was serving a life sentence on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and money laundering. He pardoned Las Vegas city councilwoman and state lawmaker Michele Fiore, who was convicted of seven counts relating to wire fraud and using government funds for her own plastic surgery. He pardoned former Culpeper County, Virginia, Sheriff Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of taking more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for deputy appointments.

These are just a few of the shady business folk Trump has pardoned at whim. Only time will tell just how many more of them get off scot-free before his term is up.

A start-up funded by a Donald Trump Jr.-backed venture capital firm has been awarded a $620 million contract from the Pentagon, reports the Financial Times.

Vulcan Elements, a small rare earths start-up, will receive the funds as part of a larger deal from the Defense Department. This $620 million loan is the largest made by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.

It’s far from the first time Don Jr. has reaped the benefits of his daddy’s presidency. Vulcan is backed by the 1789 fund, where Trump Jr. sits on the board. Four of the companies in the 1789 fund’s portfolio have been awarded government contracts just this year, to the tune of more than $735 million overall, according to the FT.

According to Trump Jr., he plays a big role in where the fund spends its money: In February, he told the FT that he was “very involved in the strategic decisions regarding where to invest our resources” at 1789.

And just a few months ago, it was reported that the Pentagon awarded a contract to an obscure drone company—where Trump Jr. happened to be an adviser, with a multimillion-dollar stake, since November 2024.

This fund is just one more avenue for the Trump family to make money off the presidency. From newfound crypto billions to global real estate deals made by the Trump Organization, we are far from the days in which presidents had to relinquish their peanut farms.

House Speaker Mike Johnson swore in Matt Van Epps to Congress Thursday morning, less than two days after Van Epps won a special election for the Tennessee 7th congressional district seat.

The time it took to swear in Van Epps, a Republican, was much shorter than the seven weeks Johnson waited before swearing in Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat. Grijalva won a special election to represent Arizona’s 7th congressional district on September 23 to replace her father, Representative Raúl Grijalva, who passed away in March. She was only sworn in on November 12.

Johnson initially refused to swear in the younger Grijalva for days, and once the government shut down at the beginning of October, claimed that he couldn’t do so until that impasse was resolved. The more likely reason was that Grijalva would have been (and later became) the deciding vote on a petition that would trigger a House vote on the government releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Van Epps’s vote is critical for the narrow House Republican majority, and since Congress and President Trump have now approved the Epstein files, Johnson doesn’t see the need to drag his feet. Van Epps, a former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and Army helicopter pilot, was endorsed by Trump. However, he defeated his Democratic challenger Aftyn Behn by a much smaller margin of victory than expected, leading national Republicans to worry about the 2026 midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

The two survivors who clung to the wreckage of the Pentagon’s September 2 airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean were still actively trying to advance their drug mission—at least, that’s what Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley is expected to tell Congress Thursday.

Bradley plans to spill how he and his advisers determined that the pair of survivors were still aboard the damaged vessel alongside packages of narcotics, supposedly making them legitimate targets for a second attack, according to defense officials that spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

Bradley is meeting lawmakers for a closed-door briefing Thursday as pressure ramps up in Washington to hold someone accountable for the merciless killing. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has faced enormous heat over the last week for the September double tap. But in an apparent effort to save Hegseth and his post from further scrutiny, the White House has redirected blame toward Bradley, who was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the attack.

Since early September, the U.S. has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The September 2 attack was the first such attack. But it is also the only known instance in which survivors were deliberately targeted and killed.

The entire debacle could be swept under the rug if Bradley’s account is deemed accurate. Geoffrey Corn, a former military lawyer who now directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech, told the Journal that if the survivors were genuinely capable of threatening U.S. military personnel after the first strike, then the Defense Department would have a “legitimate explanation for the second strike.”

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.” The needless deaths have also pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

Donald Trump, however, is still backing Hegseth. The president has so far brushed off the widespread anger at his Defense Department pick, telling inquiring reporters Wednesday that “this is war.”