The Department of War is thwarting congressional oversight of the Trump administration’s attack on a boat off the coast of Venezuela earlier this month.

On Monday afternoon, as the full details of the first drone strike remained secret, Trump announced that U.S. forces conducted a second attack on a boat in the U.S. Southern Command are of responsibility, which covers the Caribbean and all of South America. In a post on TruthSocial, he wrote that the strike killed three people. “BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” he wrote.

Although the president is posting edited videos of these strikes, information about the planning, execution, and legal justification for this campaign on alleged “narcoterrorists” is being kept secret from senior congressional staffers.

Last Tuesday, senior staff from House leadership and relevant committees were barred by the Office of the Secretary of War from attending a briefing on the first attack, according to three government sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The military cited “alternative compensatory control measures” — the term for enhanced security procedures designed to keep information under wraps — as the reason.

The War Department has attempted to conceal numerous details about the attack that killed 11 people in the Caribbean, including the fact that the vessel altered its course and appeared to have turned back toward shore prior to the strikes. Men on board were said to have survived an initial strike, The Intercept reported last week. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.

“I’m incredibly disturbed by this new reporting that the Trump Administration launched multiple strikes on the boat off Venezuela,” Rep., Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, said of The Intercept’s coverage. “They didn’t even bother to seek congressional authorization, bragged about these killings — and teased more to come.”

A very small number of Senate and House staffers, mostly from the Armed Services committees, received highly classified briefings about the attack last Tuesday, after the military delayed the meeting for days. Staff for key members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which oversee war powers, were conspicuously absent.

Briefers from the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict, the civilian Pentagon appointee who oversees special operations, made it clear that the attack was not a one-off and that lethal operations would continue, according to three sources familiar with the meetings. The Department of War did not send a lawyer to the briefing, so no expert was available to comment on the legality of the attack.

A senior defense official pushed back on claims that the Pentagon was stymying oversight. “The Department did not bar senior staff from House leadership and relevant committees from attending this briefing,” said the official. “The Department briefed House and Senate Leadership and relevant oversight committee staff with proper security clearance access.”

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson offered a stale quote from chief spokesperson Sean Parnell (previously published by The Intercept) in response to a request for comment about unconfirmed reports to The Intercept that men aboard the vessel attempted to surrender prior to being killed.

In a letter to the White House on Wednesday, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and two dozen fellow Democratic senators said the Trump administration has provided “no legitimate legal justification” for the strike. The senators requested answers to 10 key questions regarding the facts surrounding the attack and its supposed legal underpinnings.

“For decades, Congress has wrongly ceded responsibility to the President about when to declare war, and now we’re living with those consequences,” Jacobs told The Intercept. “This is why it’s never been more important for Congress to reclaim our war powers responsibilities and ensure thorough oversight and transparency into all of the Trump Administration’s military actions.”

Last week Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., introduced a war powers resolution seeking to stop the Trump administration from conducting future strikes in the Caribbean. Omar told The Intercept that it was designed to “terminate hostilities against Venezuela, and against the transnational criminal organizations that the Administration has designated as terrorists this year.”

One former Pentagon legal expert thinks framing the issue around war is a mistake. In her view, this is a clear-cut case of murder.

“A war framing confuses the issue. This is not a war.”

Sarah Harrison, who advised military leaders on legal issues related to human rights and extrajudicial killings in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, says that framing the attack in the Caribbean as an act of war is a categorical error. “A war framing confuses the issue. This is not a war,” she explained. “U.S. forces went out and committed murder.”

The legal issues at play were simple, she said: “There was no armed attack on the United States that would allow for the U.S. to use force in self-defense. There is no armed conflict between the United States and any cartel group or any Latin American country. A foreign terrorist designation of any of these groups does not change that. It does not authorize force against those groups.”

“The killing of all 11 of these men was illegal. This was a premeditated murder of suspected criminals — by definition, civilians — based on the facts provided by the administration themselves,” she told The Intercept.

“This president believes that he can kill anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances and not have to rationalize it.”

Sarah Yager, a former senior adviser on human rights to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now the Washington director at Human Rights Watch, echoed these concerns. “This president believes that he can kill anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances and not have to rationalize it — and that he will be impugned from any accountability,” she said. “I think this should be a real concern for everyone, that the rule of law is being undermined, and we don’t know what restraints there are on the use of force.”

Harrison, now a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, emphasized that Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear that the U.S. could have halted the ship and arrested the crew but chose to kill them instead. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Rubio boasted.

“Under domestic law, and it’s the same rule under international human rights law, the use of lethal force can only be executed if there is an imminent threat to life or serious bodily injury,” said Harrison. “Rubio’s statements underscore the fact that there was no such threat.” She noted that the U.S. military is prohibited by law from executing civilians under the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which includes the federal murder statute; and under a long-standing executive order that bans assassinations.

Multiple sources say that Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, conducted the lethal operation. This is considered highly unusual given all the other military assets based in the region. Col. Allie Weiskopf, SOCOM’s director of public affairs, would not comment on the command’s involvement in the attack. “We don’t have anything for you,” she told The Intercept.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and others told The Intercept the boat was attacked by one or more drones. Harrison said that the special operators who conducted the strike should be made aware that they complied with an unlawful order. She called on members of Congress to speak out on the issue.

The U.S. has continued to ratchet up tension in the Caribbean. Personnel from a U.S. warship boarded a Venezuelan tuna boat with nine fishermen while it was sailing in Venezuelan waters on Saturday, according to Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil. The boat was, he said, “illegally and hostilely boarded by a United States Navy destroyer” and 18 armed U.S. personnel remained on the vessel for eight hours. The fishermen were then released.

“We don’t have anything to offer you on this,” said a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of War in response to a request for comment on the incident and an explanation of how raiding a tuna boat contributes to U.S. national security.

Venezuelan officials believe Trump may be renewing long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple President Nicolás Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Last month, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

The Trump administration added the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups earlier this year, alleging that it is headed by Maduro and high-ranking officials in his administration. In July, Trump also signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels he has labeled terrorist organizations.

The United States has been surging military assets into the Caribbean for weeks. F-35 stealth fighters landed in Puerto Rico on Saturday afternoon, joining one of the largest U.S. military deployments to the Caribbean in years. This includes around 4,500 U.S. personnel — including Marines and sailors from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, seven U.S. warships, and one nuclear-powered attack submarine. And at least two MQ-9 Reaper drones were spotted at Coast Guard Air Station Borinquen in Puerto Rico last week. The U.S. is also engaged in the rapid restoration and re-outfitting of the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, which officially closed in 2004. 

The 22nd MEU is operating with the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima and the amphibious transport dock ships USS San Antonio and USS Fort Lauderdale. Last Monday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth visited the Iwo Jima. “What you’re doing right now — it’s not training,” he told troops on board. “This is the real-world exercise on behalf of the vital national interests of the United States of America to end the poisoning of the American people.”

Speaking on Fox News, Hegseth did not rule out regime change by the U.S. in Venezuela. “That’s a presidential-level decision, and we’re prepared with every asset that the American military has,” he said.

Jacobs, the California representative, fears that the boat attack in the Caribbean may be the opening salvo of another long-running U.S. military disaster akin to the post-9/11 wars that continue to grind on across the globe today. “We can’t let Donald Trump drag us into another forever war that our youngest generations will pay for with their lives and tax dollars,” she told The Intercept.

Update: September 15, 2025, 4:40 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include details of President Trump’s disclosure of a new U.S. military attack on alleged drug traffickers on Monday afternoon.

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