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Partisan fights played out publicly in high-profile votes in the Senate this week, but lawmakers are quietly finding common ground in their support of a push to have the unedited footage of Caribbean boat strikes released.
Tucked into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a provision that would require the Pentagon to release the full, unedited footage of boat strikes carried out in the Caribbean in exchange for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s travel budget to be fully funded.
The Trump administration has come under scrutiny on Capitol Hill for repeated strikes on alleged drug boats from Venezuela over the last several months, which came to a head last week in the wake of the deadly Sept. 2 double-strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea.
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“I think we need to see all of the video footage, particularly of the second strike from Sept. 2,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Fox News Digital.
Lawmakers in the upper chamber don’t know who slipped the provision into the colossal legislative package, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who told reporters, “I would imagine that it got added at the leadership level.”
The massive legislative package sailed through the House on Thursday and is set for a series of procedural tests in the Senate beginning on Monday. And many lawmakers broadly support the release of the footage, particularly of the double-tap strike, to Congress.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Digital that his committee, and “maybe the [Senate] Intel Committee,” should have complete access to the unedited footage.
“And then, based upon that, we can decide whether or not we would push further,” Rounds said. “But let us look at the facts first.”
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Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who also sits on the Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Digital that he fully supported the provision and noted that Hegseth and the Pentagon had already released partial footage, treating it like “almost a commercial.”
“So you released part of the video, and you’re banging your chest about it,” Kaine said. “You should release the whole thing.”
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, agreed and told Fox News Digital that it shouldn’t be a roadblock to passage of the broader defense package, either.
“There’s no excuse for not releasing it. It shouldn’t. If somebody is not releasing something, it usually tells me that they don’t want it to see the light of day,” he said. “I just want the video of the rest of the strike. That’s not me. It’s the American people who need to see this. They need to know what’s being done in their name.”
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During the week, the so-called “Gang of Eight,” which includes Republican and Democratic leadership from the Senate and House along with the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees in both chambers, met with Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for a briefing on the strikes.
Neither Thune nor Senate Intel Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., commented on the briefing, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., characterized it as “very unsatisfying.”
“I asked Secretary Hegseth, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, would he let every member of Congress see unedited videos of the Sept. 2 strike? His answer, ‘We have to study it well,’” Schumer said. “In my view, they’ve studied it long enough. Congress ought to be able to see it.”
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Some Republicans support more transparency on the matter, too, including Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who told Fox News Digital that he didn’t “have any problem” releasing the footage.
But he emphasized that the entire point of the strikes was to combat the flow of drugs into the country.
“We’re losing sight of the most important narrative, and that is, more Americans have died of illegal drugs in the last seven years than World War I, World War II and Vietnam combined,” Daines said.
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