Navy Vice Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley will brief senior members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees Thursday about his role in the Trump administration’s controversial Sept. 2 attack on a suspected drug boat from Venezuela — an attack that culminated in an alleged second strike that may have violated U.S. and international law by killing two survivors who were clinging to the ship’s wreckage.

Bradley may also provide information about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s involvement in the “double-tap” incident.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that before the initial strike, Hegseth verbally directed Special Operations Command to “kill everybody” on board the boat — and that Bradley ordered the second strike to “comply with Hegseth’s instructions.” That story sparked shock and outrage on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle vowing to conduct “vigorous oversight” and several describing the killing of shipwreck survivors as a possible war crime.

Since then, however, Hegseth and the White House have attempted to shift focus from the defense secretary to Bradley, who was head of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the attack.

On Tuesday, Hegseth told reporters that while he watched the first strike live, he “did not personally see survivors … because that thing was on fire.” He claimed that he only learned about the second strike “a couple of hours later.”

“It’s called the fog of war,” Hegseth added.

Instead, it was Bradley who made the decisive call, according to the administration. “With respect to the strikes in question, on Sept. 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday, reading a prepared statement. “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.”

Leavitt went on to say that she “would reject that the secretary of war” — that is, Hegseth — “ever said” the words “quoted in a Washington Post story” about killing everybody on the boat.

A few hours later, Hegseth posted on social media that “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.”

“We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations,” Hegseth added during a White House Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “All these strikes, they are making judgement calls and ensuring that they defend the American people. They’ve done the right things. We’ll keep doing that.”

On Sunday, President Trump defended Hegseth himself, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men” and “I believe him, 100%.”

But Trump also made it clear that he would have opposed targeting survivors of the initial attack.

“No, I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike,” the president said.

In response, critics are suggesting that the Trump administration is throwing Bradley under the bus.

“[Hegseth] is selling out Admiral Bradley and sending chills down the spines of his chain of command, who now know their boss will sell them out if he is taking heat,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut wrote on X. “A case study in how not to lead.”

“How to point the finger at someone while pretending to support him,” added Brit Hume, the chief political analyst for Fox News.

But what are the facts — about Bradley, Hegseth and what they did or didn’t do on Sept. 2? Here’s what we know.

Who is Adm. Mitch Bradley?

Bradley is currently the head of U.S. Special Operations Command. He was promoted from his previous role in charge of Joint Special Operations Command a month after the strike in question, which kicked off the Trump administration’s lethal, months-long campaign of attacking suspected drug boats in the Caribbean.

A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Bradley has been a U.S. Navy SEAL officer since 1992 and has commanded at all levels of special operations, according to his Navy bio. In 1999, Bradley qualified for the elite unit known as SEAL Team Six, where he spent the next 16 years operating, rehearsing, planning and leading clandestine operations. He was among the first American and coalition troops to deploy to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. Bradley took charge of Joint Special Operations Command under President Joe Biden in 2022.

Bradley was born and raised in Eldorado, Texas. He was a varsity gymnast at the Naval Academy. In 2005, he earned a master of science degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.; the following year, he received a provisional patent for his research. His master's thesis was titled Transport Imaging for the Study of Quantum Scattering Phenomena in Next-Generation Semiconductor Devices. He is married and has four children.

What happened on Sept. 2?

Citing “two American officials familiar with the matter,” the Intercept first reported on Sept. 10 that “people on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the U.S. military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike” — but “they were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.”

Friday’s story in the Washington Post — which was “based on interviews with and accounts from seven people with knowledge of the Sept. 2 strike and the overall operation” — confirmed the Intercept’s reporting and added new details about how Hegseth may have played a part in the incident.

Before the initial strike, the Post reported, “Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation.”

“The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

When the smoke cleared, however, a live drone feed showed “two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” In order to “comply with Hegseth’s instructions,” Bradley “ordered a second strike,” according to “two people familiar with the matter” — and “the two men were blown apart in the water.”

Monitoring the operation remotely from Fort Bragg, N.C., Hegseth told his colleagues that the survivors were “still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo,” according to the Post.

Citing “one person who watched the live feed,” the Post added that “if the video of the blast that killed the two survivors on Sept. 2 were made public, people would be horrified.”

A subsequent story in the New York Times, published Monday night, confirmed that “Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.”

But the Times also reported that five U.S. officials had told them “Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things” — and “his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.”

Instead, “Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat,” according to the Times’ sources — and “as that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.”

The Times could not confirm the Post’s reporting about “spoken directive … to kill everybody.”

Was the second strike legal?

Critics, lawmakers and legal experts view the administration’s entire campaign in the Caribbean as a possible violation of international law.

In previous administrations, the Coast Guard would intercept boats and arrest drug smugglers — not kill them.

Trump’s legal rationale, which the administration has articulated in a series of recent letters to Congress, is that the drug cartels are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” — forcing the U.S. to fight back in a formal “armed conflict.”

In response, experts have argued that drug cartels are not engaged in “hostilities” against the U.S. — the legal standard for armed conflict — because selling a dangerous product is different from conducting an armed attack.

It is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who aren’t directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals.

“The notion that the United States — and this is what the administration says is their justification — is involved in an armed conflict with any drug dealers, any Venezuelan drug dealers, is ludicrous,” Rep. Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, recently told CBS. “It wouldn’t stand up in a single court of law.”

“This is not stretching the envelope,” Geoffrey Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law of war issues, added in an interview with the New York Times. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”

Targeting people who can no longer fight — like survivors clinging to wreckage in open water — is considered an even clearer violation of the laws of armed conflict (regardless of whether they survived an attack that was intended to be “lethal”).

“Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations,” the Pentagon’s law of war manual says. “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”

On Sunday, Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska agreed, saying that if the Post’s reporting is accurate, then it reveals “a clear violation of the law of war.”

“When people want to surrender, you don’t kill them,” Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, told ABC. “They have to pose an imminent threat. It’s hard to believe that two people on a raft, trying to survive, would pose an imminent threat.”

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who served under Biden, rejected Bradley’s reported rationale about the survivors potentially calling other traffickers to retrieve their cargo.

“The administration makes up logic and rationale for the things it’s doing that defy all legal history and all precedent, and that’s basically what we’re seeing here,” Kendall said on Monday. “These people were wounded. They were in the water. They were not a threat to anybody. Again, that’s a textbook example of a war crime.”