The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Dec. 7, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face The Nation. We turn now to the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Jim Himes. He joins us this morning from Connecticut. Welcome back to Face The Nation.
REPRESENTATIVE JIM HIMES: Thanks for having me, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You are one of the few lawmakers shown the classified version of this September 2 video of the U.S. strikes an alleged drug boat near Venezuela, four strikes in total, we have learned. You met with Admiral Bradley, who commands special operations as well. The President of the United States says he is open to this video being made public. Do you think it is essential that it become public, and are you confident it will be?
REP. HIMES: I think it’s really important that this video be made public. It’s not lost on anyone, of course, that the interpretation of the video, which you know, six or seven of us had an opportunity to see last week, broke down precisely on party lines. And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself. I know how the public is going to be react- is going to react because I felt my own reaction. You know, I’ve spent years looking at videos of lethal action taken, often in the terrorism context, and this video was profoundly shaking- shaken, and I think it’s important for Americans to see it. Because, look, there’s a certain amount of there’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners, but I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Why was it- why did it shake you so much? What specifically was bothering you?
REP. HIMES: Well, you know, and this is sort of the distinction, and there’s a lot to unpack here about whether this is an authorized military action, which it is not, and right on down to whether these were legitimate- legitimate targets, and they were not. But let me go back to some of the reviews I’ve done of other lethal action. Oftentimes, when the Department of Defense takes a strike against a terrorist in Yemen or Pakistan or wherever, you watch a video of guys fully armed with AK-47s and sidearms and bombs and you name it, and they’re on their way to do something terrible. And in this instance, you may have had bad guys, I have no doubt that these guys were involved in the running of drugs. Now, whether they were running it to the United States or Europe is yet another question. But in that instance, these guys were about to die. Had the United States just walked away, their little piece of wood would have gone under the waves. And as many times as Tom Cotton may say that it doesn’t matter what they were doing, it matters essentially what they were doing. Because under the law, and if you spent 15 minutes in law school, you know this, under the law, if someone has been struck and is- continues to engage in hostilities, points a gun at you, has a gun, they may be a legitimate target. But if they are outside of combat, they are not and attacking them is a violation of the laws of war. And these guys, and this is why the American people need to see this video. These guys were, were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the DOD law of war manual seems to hinge a lot of that on whether the person is wholly disabled from fighting, and that is where the Secretary of Defense has used language saying they’re about to return to the fight. I’m going to play for you what Secretary Hegseth said at the Reagan Forum Saturday. He described what was happening with these four strikes on the alleged drug running boat.
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PETE HEGSETH ON TAPE: A couple hours later, I was told, hey, there had to be a reattack, because there were a couple folks that could still be in the fight. Access to radios, there was a link up point of another potential boat, drugs were still there, they were actively interacting with them. Had to take that reattack. I said, Roger, sounds good.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Does what Hegseth said match what Admiral Bradley told you?
REP. HIMES: Well, there was a lot of lack of clarity over exactly what Pete Hegseth’s role here was, but Pete Hegseth has no credibility on this matter, right? Remember, a week after this strike, there was a briefing for Congress. Why was a follow up strike taken? The answer then, in the first week of September, was a follow up strike was taken because we needed to clear the wreckage so that there wasn’t a danger to navigation. That was explanation number one. Explanation number two, right before we watched the video, was that they might have had a radio, and they might have been radioing a boat, and they might have been trying to recover the cocaine. And then when you actually watch the video, you realize they don’t have a radio. They’re barely hanging on and not slipping beneath the waves. Then we get this thing of how they’re trying to right the boat. This was about a 40 foot boat that had just been hit with a massive piece of munitions. The conflagration probably destroyed everything in that boat. But, oh, maybe they might have swum under, gotten a radio, probably waterlogged, and radioed a boat that we’re not even sure was there. So what we’ve had is a series of shifting explanations. Oh, and including the fog of war, right? You know that Hegseth said, well, they took the second strike because of the fog of war. There was no fog. The military watched this boat very carefully, or I shouldn’t even say, boat, they watched the wreckage of the boat very carefully for a long period of time before they took the second strike. So, look, what Pete Hegseth says about this strike has zero credibility at this point.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you have confidence in Admiral Bradley?
REP. HIMES: You know Admiral Bradley, this was my first meeting with him. Anyone who has ever worked with Admiral Bradley will tell you that he has a storied career and that he is a man of deep, deep integrity. And frankly, I have no reason to doubt that. What it raises is, what happens when an apparently good man like Admiral Bradley is placed in a context where he knows that if he countermands an order that he is perhaps uncomfortable with, it is very likely that he will be fired. When he works for a guy, Pete Hegseth, who wrote a book about how we shouldn’t observe the laws of war, about how we need to be lethal in [unintelligible]. It’s interesting to think about how a good man in that context maybe does something that, if he weren’t in that context, he might not do.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, Senator Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there were dozens of JAG law- lawyers observing all of this. On NBC this morning he said all 11 people on the suspected drug smuggling boat were valid targets because the U.S. had high confidence they were part of a foreign terrorist organization. Do you know, were these high level cartel members?
REP. HIMES: No, of course not. Of course not.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Who were they, if the U.S. had high confidence–
REP. HIMES: You think Pablo Escobar back- well, first of all, first of all, let’s be super clear about this. I don’t think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two, I don’t know, but we certainly didn’t know the identities of all 11. So nobody can characterize who all these people in any of these boats are. Now, I have enough confidence in the intelligence community to know that these are probably not guys out fishing or guys out, you know, being tourists and stuff. They are almost certainly running drugs. But this really matters for the reason that you said. You know, if you’re going to occupy an immense amount of the American naval combat capability, you’d like to believe that you’re going after the leaders, the cartel leaders, the- the kingpins, as they say. What we’re doing here is we’re taking out the equivalent of the corner drug dealer in the Bronx, right? Which, by the way, we should arrest the corner drug dealer in the Bronx. But the main reason we do that is to go after the kingpins who, I promise you, are sitting in very comfortable villas right now in Colombia and Venezuela and everywhere, and watching as much of the United States Navy is dedicated to taking out their lowest level employees.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So I hear you saying they were not on an internal military target list for high value individuals. That’s what I hear, what you’re saying.
REP. HIMES: Well, this is an interesting question. I’m not at all convinced that there is a list of individuals. Now, this is what we do in the terrorism world, right? We designate high value targets. We designate individuals. I have no reason to believe, and in fact, I doubt that there are any individuals on the list anywhere. What we are doing, and I’m not going to get terribly specific about it, for obvious reasons, but what we are doing is we’re picking up that this boat may be carrying drugs, and to the administration, it doesn’t matter who’s in that boat, because- and look, they’re saying this, because if this boat is actually carrying drugs, then we can strike it. So no, I don’t think there is a list of individuals. I don’t think we have any idea who precisely the individuals in these boats are.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So as I understand it, these are signature strikes. This is an intelligence assessment based on signals intelligence saying this is who we believe these individuals to be. You know, some of these defenders of the Trump policy, like conservative columnists, have argued this is a precedent that was set by the Obama administration, which used signature strikes to kill alleged al Qaeda operatives, including a U.S. citizen at one point in Yemen. Do they have a point here that the drone policy has long allowed the killing of suspected criminals, even without due process?
REP. HIMES: Well, there’s a couple of really important distinctions, and you’ll remember that the Obama administration, there was a lot of debate over whether signature strikes were okay or not. The most important distinction is that Congress authorized the war on terror. There was an authorization for the use of military force. The original sin of this whole thing, whether you think we should be wasting these guys or not, the original sin is that there is no congressional authorization. And then in the Obama administration, they did have a list of individuals, right? Often high value targets, or HVTs as we’ve referred to them. And then the question was, if you have an HVT, a high value target, in a jeep in northern Pakistan, and there’s a guy next to that HVT, you know, how do you feel about taking that strike? You want to take down the high value guy, but what about the young guy next to him? Well, the young guy has an AK 47 and the young guy was actually arranging for the transfer of explosives. You have that conversation, and then you decide whether you’re gonna take the strike. Right now what we’re doing, and again, don’t- I don’t think that there’s a list of individuals anywhere. They’re just saying that boat is carrying drugs. And even though military is not authorized by the Congress of the United States, we’re taking out the boat, and we don’t give a damn about who’s on it.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, and when you say “I don’t think,” you are a member of the Gang of Eight, so presumably that information should be shared with you if it does exist. I want to ask you before I let you go. Signalgate, people may remember a few months ago, the Trump- a Trump official added a journalist to an online group on Signal and shared advanced information of an upcoming bombing operation in Yemen. The Pentagon Inspector General said Hegseth’s actions risked operational security and violated federal laws on record keeping. Hegseth said he’d do the same thing all over again. Are your Republican colleagues saying in private that they have problems with what happened?
REP. HIMES: Absolutely, they’re saying it in private. In public, of course, they’re saying that it was perfect exoneration, right? That this report, and you read the key line, that this report that said that the Secretary of Defense put his troops in the mission at risk, that that’s total exoneration. Now, I didn’t hear the comment about I would do this again. But if Pete Hegseth said he would do that again- and look, again, you don’t need to be a military expert to understand that sharing operational details before an operation is a really, really, really bad idea. If Pete Hegseth said that, that he would do that again, you know, he’s just reinforcing what we all know, which is that he has absolutely no business in that job. One of the most sensitive and difficult jobs to do in the United States government is being done by somebody who put his own people and the mission at risk.
MARGARET BRENNAN: He said he lives life without regret at the Reagan Forum, that was the phrase, to be more exact. But Congressman Himes, always good to have you on the program. I’ll have to leave it there for today. We’ll be right back.