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Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called for the Pentagon to release a video of a second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean that has sparked widespread backlash.
Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” moderator Kristen Welker directly asked Schiff if he believes the Trump administration’s Sept. 2 strike that killed the survivors of an initial strike on the boat was “legal.”
Her question came after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said earlier Sunday on “Meet the Press” that it was “entirely appropriate to strike the boat again to make sure that its cargo was destroyed.”
Cotton argued the move was in “no way a violation of the law of war.”
Speaking with Welker, Schiff called out the strikes as “unlawful” and “unconstitutional.”
“Killing two people who are shipwrecked at sea is also morally repugnant,” he said. “I agree with Tom, we should do everything lawfully that we can to stop the scourge of drugs coming into this country. But this is not at all lawful or constitutional.”
The California senator argued that if the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are “so proud of what they’re doing,” then they should “let the American people see that video.”
“Let the American people see two people standing on a capsized boat or sitting on a capsized boat [get] deliberately killed, and [let them] decide for themselves whether they’re proud of what their country is doing,” he continued. “I can’t imagine people would be proud of that.”
On Saturday, Hegseth refused to say whether the Pentagon would release footage of the controversial operation.
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“We’re reviewing it right now to make sure sources, methods – I mean it’s an ongoing operation ... We’ve got operators out there doing this right now, so whatever we were to decide to release we’d have to be very responsible about,” Hegseth said during an interview at the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi, California.
Meanwhile, Trump said Wednesday that his administration would “certainly release” any footage from the strikes following a report alleging that the U.S. military issued an order to kill two survivors.
“I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
Schiff then told Welker, “As you pointed out, the manual on the law of war makes it explicit that killing people who are shipwrecked is illegal, is a violation of law.”
The Democrat went on to say that the “most troubling thing” he heard Cotton say is that “it really didn’t matter what these people were doing on that capsized boat, whether they were signaling their distress and asking for rescue or what they were doing.”
Schiff argued: “It does matter.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Schiff said that not only are the strikes “unlawful,” but “they’re a form of extra-judicial killing.”
“These boats are not invading the United States in an armed assault. They’re thousands of miles away. Some of them, maybe even this vessel, if reports are accurate, wasn’t even heading to the United States,” the politician said. “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.”
He also noted that even if the Trump administration “may put a group of organizations, terrorists, narco-terrorist organizations on a list,” it “doesn’t change the legal ability [and] doesn’t confer on a president the ability to kill them at sea.”
Wrapping up his remarks, Schiff added that “we need a thorough investigation to find out what the orders were” for the strikes, and “whether it was to kill everybody in an organization without knowing specifically who these people were, or what the situation was.”
Watch Schiff’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” below.
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