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. 

The House unanimously passed a bill on Monday barring anyone linked to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel from moving to the United States.

It’s a rare moment of bipartisanship on the topic of Israel, an issue that’s otherwise exacerbated deep fractures within both parties in the House of Representatives — particularly for Democrats.

The Republican-led legislation is called the ‘No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act of 2025’ and was introduced by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.

It passed the House by voice vote on Monday afternoon, meaning it advanced with unanimous approval without lawmakers taking individual votes on the bill.

‘There are still some things we can come together on in this body, and one of them is opposition to Hamas and the terrorism they unleashed on civilians in Israel more than two years ago,’ McClintock told Fox News Digital.

‘What this does is place them in the same category as Nazi collaborators in the Holocaust, which are also referenced in the Immigration Nationality Act.’

The bill now heads to the U.S. Senate, where a parallel effort was introduced earlier this year by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.

McClintock told Fox News Digital he was hopeful the Senate would take up the bill — while noting it passed the House last term as well without the upper chamber taking action.

‘The repeated actions of the House in passing this bill, I think, will hopefully inspire the Senate to take it up this year and send it to the president,’ he said. ‘It’s important for two reasons. Number one, to prevent a future Joe Biden from admitting such people, and to empower a future Donald Trump presidency to keep them out.’

The legislation would amend existing U.S. immigration law to deem ‘any alien who carried out, participated in, planned, financed, afforded material support to, or otherwise facilitated any of the attacks against Israel initiated by Hamas beginning on October 7, 2023’ inadmissible to the country.

It would also add Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the list of terror groups whose members and supporters are barred from the U.S. under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

It comes after a Gazan native, Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi, who was residing in Louisiana, was arrested earlier this year over his alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack.

President Donald Trump is continuing to advocate for the Senate GOP to nix the filibuster.

In a Monday Truth Social post, the president shared a video featuring clips of former Attorney General Eric Holder, who opined that if Democrats win a ‘trifecta’ in the 2028 elections, the prospect of expanding the Supreme Court should be under consideration. 

Holder made the comment while speaking with Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch, which posted the video last month.

In the Monday Truth Social post, Trump referred to Holder, who served under Democratic President Barack Obama, as an ‘Obama sycophant’ and said that ‘Eric Holder (known as ‘FAST AND FURIOUS’) just gave a Speech where he emphatically stated, above all else, that Democrats will PACK the Supreme Court of the United States if they get the chance. The word is, he wants 21 Radical Left Activist Judges, not being satisfied with the heretofore 15 that they were seeking.’

Trump suggested that eliminating the filibuster would enable Republicans to win in the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 White House contest.

‘It will be 21, they will destroy our Constitution, and there’s not a thing that the Republicans can do about it unless we TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, which will lead to an easy WIN of the Midterms, and an even easier WIN in the Presidential Election of 2028,’ he asserted.

‘Why would the Republicans even think about giving them this opportunity? The American People don’t want gridlock, they want their Leaders to GET THINGS DONE — TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, AND HAVE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL FOUR YEARS IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY, BY FAR, WITH NOT EVEN THE HINT OF A SHUTDOWN OF OUR GREAT NATION ON JANUARY 30TH!’ Trump declared in the post.

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.

President Donald Trump threw himself in the middle of Honduras’ razor-thin presidential race on Monday, warning that there would be ‘hell to pay’ if election officials altered the results.  

Writing on Truth Social, Trump, without offering evidence, accused Honduras of ‘trying to change the results.’

‘If they do, there will be hell to pay! The people of Honduras voted in overwhelming numbers on November 30th,’ Trump said.

The president’s remarks came hours after Ana Paola Hall, president of the National Electoral Council, wrote on X that the preliminary rapid reporting system that began providing results Sunday night had reached its conclusion with votes 57% tallied.

Their count showed a close race between two conservative candidates, Nasry Asfura of the National Party and Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, with Asfura holding a narrow lead of only a few hundred votes. Rixi Moncada, the democratic socialist LIBRE candidate, trailed roughly 20 percentage points behind.  

‘It is imperative that the Commission finish counting the Votes,’ Trump wrote. ‘Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans must have their Votes counted. Democracy must prevail!’

Officials have said the count would continue but did not specify when updated totals would be released, and parts of the council’s online system appeared to have been taken down.

Just before the freeze, Trump had endorsed Asfura, calling him the ‘only Honduran candidate his administration would work with and saying he would fight ‘narco-communists’ alongside the U.S.

Both leading candidates have pointed to the close tally as evidence that they are ahead – though both men have stopped short of declaring victory.

Trump’s announcement that he would pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is now serving a 45-year U.S. sentence – also loomed large over the race, underscoring how U.S. politics can intrude in the country’s politics.

Trump’s latest warning injects new pressure into an already hostile post-election environment. The outcome will determine whether the Latin American country shifts away from the ruling LIBRE party and have deep impacts on its future relationship with Washington.