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As President Donald Trump draws closer to a potential decision on expanding his military pressure on Venezuela, his administration is facing skepticism from congressional Republicans on multiple fronts.
GOP senators questioned the administration’s decision-making on Monday after the White House confirmed a second September strike on alleged narcotraffickers who survived an initial attack. It’s a decision that has already prompted bipartisan investigations on both sides of the Capitol.
Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., said that the second strike on alleged traffickers who were already wounded “seems way over the edge to me.” Justice called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a “good guy” and the “right choice to be leading our military” but added that “if he made that decision, I think he’s made a bad decision.”
“We have always been trained to believe that folks who surrender, we don’t just mow them down for the sake of mowing them down,” Justice said. “You have a situation like this where you’ve got survivors evidently in the water and we pulled a second strike off? It’s just not acceptable.”
Still other Republicans were befuddled by Trump’s pardon of an ex-president of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking — a decision that appears to undercut the tough anti-drug effort that he has billed as the chief reason for his multiple strikes off the coast of Venezuela.
It’s a make-or-break moment for Trump’s foreign policy in the Americas. After essentially shutting down the US’ southern border, he shifted focus to Venezuela with repeated strikes on alleged drug boats that have sparked calls for more information to be shared with Congress.
Still, even as some Republicans questioned Trump’s campaign, most backed the president. The controversy over the Sept. 2 double-strike could change things.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday that Admiral Frank Bradley, the commander of the US Special Operations Command, was in charge of the September operation, adding that he “worked well within his authority and the law.”
But after Hegseth and a Pentagon spokesperson initially denied reporting on the order to strike wounded survivors, some senators were left with further questions. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a staunch critic of the Trump administration’s Venezuela operations, told Semafor he was “confused” after Hegseth’s initial denial.
“Was he incompetent enough not to know that it happened? Or was he lying yesterday?” Paul said. “He acted like he didn’t even know it happened … he said it was fake news yesterday. And today: ‘It happened.’ I would think someone needs to hold someone’s feet to the fire.”
Trump has defended Hegseth and said he believed him “100 percent.”
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The Trump administration’s decision to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández is complicating its tough-on-drugs messaging. Trump said on Sunday that people in Honduras viewed Hernandez’s conviction as a “Biden administration set-up” and agreed with them after reviewing the case. Leavitt argued that Hernandez’s “court-appointed lawyer was only given three weeks to prepare for trial.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a reliable second-term ally of Trump’s, credited Trump’s focus on drug interdiction but said Monday he couldn’t agree with the decision to erase the sentence of “someone who was complicit, potentially, with that terrible pathology we’ve seen — 70,000 Americans die every year from an overdose.”
“I’m a doctor. I have worked in a hospital for the uninsured. I have seen people die of cocaine that this guy may have helped bring in,” Cassidy said. “If it’s true that the Justice Department had a valid case that he was complicit in running drugs into our country, then he should still be in jail.”
Several other senators, including Justice, declined comment. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sounded resigned to questionable uses of the pardon power by presidents in both parties.
“How can you say anything about these extreme pardons? Biden pardoning all of his family and this president doing it. The only thing you can say is: it’s an unquestioned power of the president of the United States and they can do it however they want to,” Grassley said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he wasn’t sure about the decision-making behind the pardon or how the Venezuelan double-strike will shake out.
“I’m sure it’s got a benefit to it, trying to get us some influence in Honduras. It would be good if Honduras broke our way, but I don’t know what that’s about,” Graham said of the pardon.
As for the strikes, he said: “People survive a boat strike, they’re not combatants — and a guy in a parachute is not a combatant. So we’ll see what the facts are.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said “we’ll wait and get the facts” about the strike and declined to comment further. The Senate Armed Services Committee is conducting “vigorous oversight” of the incident, committee leaders said recently.
Room for Disagreement
Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., said the United States has been striking terrorists since the attacks in 2001 and the US is within its rights to do so.
He said had confidence in Bradley and that if Congress did an investigation “every single time we dropped a bomb on terrorists, then we’d do nothing else besides nominations and hearings on bombings.”
Notable
- The Washington Post first reported that Hegseth gave the order for the follow-on strike against the alleged drug boat on Sept. 2.
- The president’s advisers were scheduled to hold a Monday evening meeting on Venezuela policy, CNN reported, but no details on the result were immediately released.