President Trump’s Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed Senators Tuesday on the two fatal U.S. military boat attacks in the Caribbean on September 2, but withheld video showing the killing of two survivors of the first strike, which many lawmakers say may be a war crime. Hegseth said he would show the second strike video only to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
After Hegseth’s briefing, U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) was asked why Hegseth won’t share the video with all members of Congress.
Mullin replied: “Because there’s a lot of members that’s gonna walk out of there that’s gonna leak classified information and there’s gotta be certain ones that you hold accountable. So not everyone can go through the same background checks that need to be cleared for this.” He asked: “Do you think Omar needs all this information? I will say no.”
Mullin added the concern that “stuff gets leaked out of classified meetings all the time.”
[NOTE: Mullin presumably refers to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the Somali-born congresswoman whom President Trump has frequently targeted, suggesting she be deported and saying recently: “We don’t wanna hear from her. I don’t wanna hear from her. There’s nothing worse than a person that comes in and does nothing but [expletive] and comes from a place where she shouldn’t be telling us what to do.”]
Raju: “Why not give everybody the access to this information that could inform their key votes?”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin: “Because there’s a lot of members that’s going to walk out of there that’s going to leak…Do you think [Ilhan] Omar needs all this information? I will say no.” pic.twitter.com/OUcsD8hCQf
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) December 16, 2025
When asked why not just make the video public, Mullin said it’s “because of the sensitivity of the equipment being used and the techniques are at a highly classified level.”
The Senator claimed that “the only reason why this is a thing is because of the hemisphere to which they’re operating in. Because no one threw a big fit about these when it was happening in the Middle East.”
Asked on December 3 about releasing video of the second strike to the public, President Trump said “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem.” Asked about that statement five days later, Trump took a different approach, as seen below.
Q: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd.”
Trump: “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news.”
Trump on Dec. 3: “Whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.” pic.twitter.com/jxCwvCKmDL
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) December 8, 2025