A Navy admiral at the center of a widening controversy over a deadly U.S. military strike off Venezuela told lawmakers Thursday there was no “kill them all” order from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Lawmakers from both parties say serious questions remain.
Sen. Tom Cotton, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley “was very clear that he was given no such order, to give no quarter or to kill them all,” after leaving a classified briefing. Cotton defended the operation, but Democrats who viewed video of the strike said the footage shows two unarmed survivors being killed.
Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the direction communicated to forces was effectively: “Destroy the drugs, kill the 11 people on the boat.” He demanded further investigation into why a follow-on strike was launched even after the vessel was inoperable.
Bradley, now commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, appeared alongside Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine as Congress digs into whether the operation — conducted in international waters on Sept. 2 — violated U.S. or international law.
Cotton said the video shows “two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States so they could stay in the fight.”
Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, disputed that characterization: “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States.”
The Trump administration has argued that drug-running crews qualify as armed combatants because their cargo represents a lethal threat to Americans — a sweeping interpretation Democrats say allows the military to use force in situations far from traditional war zones. Smith called that rationale “the core problem,” warning it dramatically expands the circumstances in which deadly force is used.
Republicans such as Cotton praised the campaign as taking “the battle” to cartels, but some GOP lawmakers remain uneasy about its legal basis. Sen. Thom Tillis said that if survivors were intentionally targeted, “anybody in the chain of command … needs to be held accountable.”
Key committee leaders in both chambers attended the closed briefings. Democrats are pressing for public release of the full video, written orders, and any directives issued by Hegseth. Republicans have not publicly joined those demands but say they will conduct a full review.
At the time of the attack, Bradley led Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees elite U.S. special operations units. He was promoted roughly a month later to head U.S. Special Operations Command, with broad bipartisan praise for his three-decade career in the Navy SEALs and joint operations.
But Bradley’s account is emerging as pressure intensifies on Hegseth. The Defense Department inspector general is separately releasing a partially redacted report about Hegseth’s unauthorized use of the Signal app to share details of a strike on Yemen’s Houthi militants — a move investigators say endangered personnel. The Pentagon has presented the report as clearing him.
Congressional investigators say multiple documents exist that could clarify the strike sequence, the intelligence used to justify it, and the rules of engagement. Whether that material becomes public will depend largely on Republican committee chairs, putting them in a politically sensitive position given President Trump’s strong defense of Hegseth.
More than 80 people have died in the series of strikes launched since September against vessels the administration labels “narco-terrorist” threats. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the deaths of the two survivors were a foreseeable outcome of Hegseth’s directive. “He may not have been in the room, but he was in the loop,” he said.