US President Donald Trump said Monday that he will defer to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to determine whether to release the full video of a second strike on suspected drug smugglers off Venezuela, stepping back from his remarks made last week.
"I didn't say that. You said that, I didn't say that," Trump said at the White House when a reporter began her question with: "Mr. president, you said you would have 'no problem' with releasing the full video of that strike on Sept. 2 off the coast of Venezuela."
"Whatever Hegseth wants to do is okay with me," Trump replied.
Last Wednesday, Trump was asked why the administration had released video of the first strike from the Sept. 2 incident but not the second, which is at the center of allegations that two survivors clinging to wreckage may have been killed. The administration showed the video only to members of Congress in a closed session.
"I don't know what they have, but whatever they have would certainly (be) released. No problem," he said.
Hegseth, addressing a forum in the state of California on Saturday, declined to confirm whether the video would be released, despite Trump's previous statements.
"We are reviewing the process, and we'll see," he said.
The Sept. 2 strike was the first of 22 that the Pentagon has carried out, killing more than 85 people. Hegseth, in his remarks Saturday, said the strikes will continue.
"These narco-terrorists are the al-Qaeda of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaeda. We are tracking them, we are killing them, and we will keep killing them so long as they are poisoning our people with narcotics," he said.
While the administration maintains that the strike was lawful and necessary, members of Congress and legal experts have raised doubts, with some Democrats warning that targeting survivors could amount to a war crime.
