Sen. Adam Schiff isn’t letting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hide behind vague statements and redacted briefings. On Sunday, the California Democrat issued a blunt challenge to Hegseth: if the administration is so confident in the legality of its Caribbean boat strikes, release the video and let Americans judge for themselves.
Schiff’s call came during a tense appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, where moderator Kristen Welker pressed him on whether the Trump administration’s Sept. 2 follow-up strike—one that killed the survivors of the first attack on an alleged drug boat—was legal. Hours earlier, Sen. Tom Cotton had gone on the same program defending the second strike as “entirely appropriate” and “in no way a violation of the law of war.”
Schiff didn’t mince words. He labeled the strikes “unlawful” and “unconstitutional,” adding: “Killing two people who are shipwrecked at sea is also morally repugnant.” While he agreed that stopping drug trafficking is essential, Schiff said this operation crossed every legal and moral line: “This is not at all lawful or constitutional.”
And that’s where he pushed Hegseth: If the Pentagon really believes the mission was justified, then stop talking about it and show the country what actually happened.
“Let the American people see two people standing on a capsized boat or sitting on a capsized boat [get] deliberately killed,” he said. “I can’t imagine people would be proud of that.”
Hegseth, speaking a day earlier at the Reagan National Defense Forum, dodged the question of whether the footage would ever be made public. He leaned on the usual “sources and methods” line, calling it an “ongoing operation” and insisting the Pentagon must be “very responsible” about anything it releases.
But Trump, in classic fashion, contradicted his own Defense Department, telling reporters last week that the administration would “certainly release” whatever footage exists: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem.”
Schiff wasn’t buying the mixed messaging. He reminded Welker that the U.S. manual on the law of war explicitly bans killing shipwrecked individuals: “It’s illegal, is a violation of law.” What rattled him most, he said, was Cotton’s suggestion that the survivors’ behavior didn’t matter—whether they were signaling distress, begging for rescue, or simply clinging to debris.
“It does matter,” Schiff fired back.
He went further, arguing the strikes weren’t just unlawful, but amounted to extra-judicial killings: “These boats are not invading the United States in an armed assault. They’re thousands of miles away… And for us to be engaged in this kind of unauthorized campaign of extra-judicial killing, couldn’t be, I think, a more clear violation of the law.”
Schiff also warned that slapping labels like “terrorist” or “narco-terrorist organization” on groups doesn’t magically give a president the authority to kill people at sea.
By the end of the interview, Schiff made clear what he believes must happen next: a full-blown investigation. Americans deserve to know whether the military was ordered to “kill everybody in an organization without knowing specifically who these people were, or what the situation was.”
watch the segment below:
