Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed the closed-door briefings held Tuesday on the U.S. military’s strikes on an alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean, calling them “a joke.”
“Were you satisfied with the answers that you’ve gotten so far today in these classified briefings?” journalist Pablo Manríquez asked Ocasio-Cortez in a clip shared on X Tuesday.
The New York Democrat immediately responded, “Oh, hell no.”
“That was a joke, that was a joke,” she continued.
AOC was then asked if any questions were answered about the deadly second strike on an alleged drug boat this September, which killed two people who survived the initial strike.
“There was not a single piece of information that was shared that even rises to the level of any other briefing that we’ve seen on Ukraine, China, anything. This was not a serious intelligence briefing. This was a communication of opinion, and if this administration wants to go to war, they need to go get it from Congress,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a closed-door meeting for all members of Congress on Tuesday about the U.S. military strikes.
Hegseth later said the Pentagon would not publicly release the unedited video of a controversial second strike attack — also referred to as a “double-tap” — which took place in early September. That strike killed 11, including two who initially survived.
“In keeping with longstanding [Pentagon] policy, of course we’re not going to rrelease a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth told reporters Tuesday.
Members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will see the footage, “but not the general public,” he added. It was not immediately clear if all members of Congress would be allowed to view it, too.
President Donald Trump’s administration has killed at least 95 people in a series of strikes targeting alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also expressed his disappointment with the meeting, saying that Hegseth and administration officials came “empty-handed.”
“If they can’t be transparent on this, how can they be transparent on all the other issues swirling about the Caribbean?” Schumer said.
“All senators are entitled to see it,” he added. “I also believe every American should see an appropriate version … of what happened September 2. I saw it. It is deeply troubling. … We don’t want another endless war. We don’t want to stumble into something, and given Trump’s erratic back-and-forth on this issue — I worry about that, and so do many Americans.”
Meanwhile, administration officials insist the two dozen strikes they’ve carried out are within legal bounds, supported by the administration’s notice to Congress that the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants.”
Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, who issued the order to fire a second time on the vessel on September 2, also addressed lawmakers in closed-door briefings earlier this month.
