The White House confirmed and defended conducting a second strike against alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean in September, amid the Trump administration’s crusade targeting the influx of drugs into the U.S. 

The White House’s statement comes after the Washington Post reported Friday that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth verbally ordered that a Sept. 2 attack kill everyone on board the alleged drug boat, drawing scrutiny from lawmakers who are requesting additional oversight into the strikes. The Post reported that a second strike was conducted to take out the remaining survivors on the boat. 

Although the Pentagon pushed back against the report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not deny that a second strike occurred and told reporters Monday that the strike Sept. 2 was conducted ‘in self-defense’ in international waters ‘in accordance with the law of armed conflict.’ 

The White House said Monday that Hegseth authorized the second strike, but the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. Frank ‘Mitch’ Bradley, ordered and directed it. At the time of the strike, Bradley was serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, which falls under U.S. Special Operations Command. 

‘On September 2nd, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,’ Leavitt said. ‘Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.’

When asked to confirm that Bradley was the one who ordered the second strike, Leavitt said that he was ‘well within his authority to do so,’ but declined to disclose whether the second strike was ordered because there were survivors remaining from the first strike. 

Leavitt also disputed that Hegseth ever gave an initial order to ensure that everyone on board was killed, when asked specifically about Hegseth’s instructions. 

‘I would reject that the secretary of War ever said that,’ Leavitt said. ‘However, the president has made it quite clear that if narco-terrorists, again, are trafficking illegal drugs toward the United States, he has the authority to kill them.’

The White House’s statements on the matter don’t completely align with the Pentagon’s. On Friday, the Pentagon denied the Post’s reporting in its entirety. 

‘We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday,’ Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a post on social media Friday. ‘These people just fabricate anonymously sourced stories out of whole cloth. Fake News is the enemy of the people.’ 

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Meanwhile, the report has prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to ask additional questions about the operations, and press for additional oversight. 

‘This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean,’ Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., who lead the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Saturday. ‘We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.’

Spokespeople for the committee did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital regarding the nature of these additional oversight efforts. 

Additionally, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said Monday that she is calling for an investigation into the matter as well, and said that Hegseth ‘owes answers to the American people immediately.’

The Trump administration has carried out more than 20 strikes against alleged drug boats in Latin American waters, and has bolstered its military presence in the Caribbean to align with Trump’s goal to crack down on the influx of drugs into the U.S.

The White House also confirmed Monday that Trump is slated to hold a meeting on Monday evening to discuss future actions concerning Venezuela. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that the Trump administration is ‘actively re-examining’ all the Afghan nationals who entered the United States during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

‘Any individual who threatens our national security or our citizenry will be subject to removal,’ Leavitt told reporters during a White House press briefing. ‘President Trump has already permanently paused the migration of foreign nationals from third world countries that pose a very high risk to the United States. For too long, past American presidents supported self-destruction, self-destructive immigration policies that allowed foreigners who outright hate our country and have no interest in assimilating into our culture.’

The announcement comes after the death of 20-year-old National Guardsman Sarah Beckstrom, who was allegedly shot in the nation’s capital last week by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national. 

A second National Guardsman, 24-year-old Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, is still in the hospital and fighting for his life.

President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday that the Wolfe family are ‘unbelievably great people’ who want the public to pray for their son.

‘Sarah and Andrew are heroes, and we will never forget their sacrifice. That means ensuring the monster responsible for this atrocity is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and faces the most severe punishment possible. It also means reckoning with why this atrocity was allowed to happen in the first place, so that it may never occur again,’ said Leavitt.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also announced Friday that the federal agency would conduct a reexamination of all green card holders from so-called countries of concern.

White House envoy Steve Witkoff is in Moscow is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday after a whirlwind weekend of negotiations with Ukraine aimed at securing a peace deal.

All eyes are on Putin as Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and occasional foreign policy envoy, feel out whether Putin might agree to the 19-point proposal they finalized with Ukrainian counterparts following initial U.S.-Russian talks.

The latest round of diplomacy represents the most active push toward a potential settlement since the full-scale invasion in 2022, but negotiators acknowledge that significant obstacles remain. Core disputes over territory, Ukraine’s long-term security arrangements, and the conditions for any ceasefire are unresolved, and officials say progress will depend on whether Putin shows flexibility during this week’s meetings.

After an initial 28-point plan brokered by Witkoff and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev was viewed by Kyiv as too favorable to Moscow, U.S. and Ukrainian officials went back to the drawing board. They met in Geneva at the end of November to work through a trimmed-down version of the plan and again over the weekend in Florida to hammer out additional details.

Both sides said the talks were productive but offered no specifics on which issues still divide them.

‘So much work remains,’ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after the meeting. ‘But today was again a very productive and useful session where I think additional progress was made.’

‘There’s a good chance we can make a deal,’ Trump said.

Despite the momentum, the two sides remain far apart. Several of the most sensitive issues were left for a meeting between principal leaders.

Russia insists Ukraine cannot join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — even though Ukraine amended its constitution to make NATO membership a national objective. In the original 28-point plan, Russia also demanded Ukraine reduce its peacetime armed forces to 600,000.

European and Ukrainian officials instead floated an 800,000 cap, according to the Financial Times. Ukraine currently fields around 880,000 troops, up from about 209,000 before the 2022 invasion.

The largest impasse remains territorial concessions. A draft of the earlier proposal suggested recognizing Crimea and large parts of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions as de facto Russian.

Complicating the process is the sudden removal of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, who resigned after a corruption probe led to a raid of his home. Yermak had publicly insisted days earlier that Ukraine would not give up land for peace. 

‘Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,’ he told The Atlantic magazine. 

Putin said at the end of November he was ready for ‘serious’ talks but also asserted that Russia has the upper hand and would halt fighting only if Ukrainian forces withdraw from territory it has recaptured on the front lines.

‘If they don’t withdraw, we will achieve this by force,’ he said.

Analysts say Washington still has levers it could use if negotiations stall, including tightening sanctions and expanding military assistance to Ukraine. But many of the most powerful economic measures — such as penalties on major Russian energy and financial entities — are already in place, and the U.S. has provided Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military aid since 2022. 

That leaves a narrower set of options if the talks reach an impasse.

Trump has voiced frustration with the slow pace of diplomacy in recent days, saying publicly that he believed a resolution ‘should have happened a long time ago,’ though officials have not indicated that Washington is preparing to walk away from the talks.