Contrarians, you do not want to miss this interview. New details have emerged about the September strikes on a Venezuelan “drug boat” that could shake our allies and incentivize our adversaries. Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, joins Jen to deliver shocking updates and concerning warnings.
What can you expect from this interview? Expert insight from Rep. Smith, who breaks down the recent hearing with Admiral Bradley. What does it mean to “kill everyone?” Why does Secretary Hegseth’s story contrast with what we know? Why were proper legal processes not followed? These questions, and so much more, are answered in Jen’s latest interview with Rep. Smith.
Contrarians, please join us and Rep. Smith in demanding the release of the full videos from the strikes by reaching out to your representatives. Your voices matter as we fight to secure the truth and the future of our democracy.
Adam Smith has been the U.S. Representative for Washington’s 9th district for fifteen terms and is a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. Before his election to the House, Smith serves as prosecutor and pro tem judge in Seattle.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of the Contrarian. I am delighted to have with us Representative Adam Smith, who is the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. Welcome, Congressman, it’s a pleasure to have you.
Adam Smith
Well, thanks for having me back. Good to see you.
Jen Rubin
You have gotten some briefings on the so-called second strike, on a, from what we understand, an unarmed boat in the Caribbean on September 2nd. But also, perhaps something on the overall mission. Tell us, first of all, what you know about what happened on September 2nd.
Adam Smith
Sure, there are multiple layers to this, and I think it is good to start where you started and sort of build out from that to understand the problems with this policy, and then also the even more problematic motivations behind it. But starting with the strike, so September 2nd, and running through the timeline, the Trump administration sort of decided to take this approach at the end of July. And they worked with the Department of Defense and White House to figure it out, and then on August 5th, they issued what’s called an execute order, and that’s where the White House basically tasks DOD with doing something. And that was the something in this question, was to find drug boats, and blow them up in international waters in Latin America, starting in the Caribbean, moving into the other side on the Pacific. So, the first… strike, was September 2nd, was the one that we’ve seen. And it’s important to note that at that point, the legal justification for these strikes had not been written. That didn’t get written until September 5th. So 3 days after the first strikes, and then, as I was told by Admiral Bradley, it wasn’t actually transmitted to them until sometime in November. Now, they had conversations about the legalities around it. I don’t want to imply that they didn’t, but the clear legal framework was not given. So on September 2nd, they took the first strike. 11 people were on this boat. I am reasonably satisfied that the intelligence was correct, and that these 11 had cocaine in that boat, and they were part of a cartel that was trying to transship that cocaine somewhere. Crucially, we don’t know where, by the way. It was going to some transit point. There’s very little evidence that it was ever going to get to the United States. So they hit it the first time, and then, as the video showed, some few minutes after the smoke cleared, you could see that there were two survivors. And that played out for 43 minutes before the second strike. And the two survivors were on top… first of all, the boat was capsized, and it appeared that the boat had broken in, I don’t know, about half, but parts of it had broken off, because they were clinging to the bow. the capsized bow of the boat, which probably wasn’t any bigger than your average kitchen table. Very small piece of the boat that was sticking outside of the water. They took their shirts off at some point, they had no communication devices, and they were standing on top of the boat, when 43 minutes later, the second strike occurs, you know, sinking the rest of the boat and killing them. And the legal justification for that is very, very questionable, and I can walk through that if you.
Jen Rubin
Yes. Let me ask a few very specific questions, first of all. First of all, have you seen the execute order?
Adam Smith
No. You see, that’s another thing, because one of those themes that I want to get to, the Trump administration doesn’t believe that the law or rules apply to them. We’ve had many, many arguments. If you’ve worked in public policy in any capacity, you have arguments with the executive branch about what they’re doing, whether or not it’s legal. That always happens. This administration is unique in that they don’t think the law applies to them. They’re not arguing, oh, you’re misinterpreting the law, it should allow me to do this. They just go. One of the things in the law is that all of these execute orders are supposed to be transmitted to the committees of jurisdiction, House Armed Services, Senate Services, within 30 days. They have not transmitted a single execute order to us since Trump became president, and this one has not been transmitted either, despite repeated requests. So, no, I have not seen it, we do not have it, that is a violation of the law.
Jen Rubin
And when you say that there wasn’t a legal opinion rendered, at least in writing, until much later, do you have evidence that before or during that September 2nd strike, that there was a lawyer involved at all?
Adam Smith
I am told that there was, but we don’t have evidence in the sense that one thing that came out, they didn’t record any of this. We have no recordings of the conversations going on between the various people involved in this. Now, Admiral Bradley assured us, and I take him at his word, that throughout this process, they were speaking to the lawyers, the judge advocate generals who were assigned to this case, they were consulting, working through, having conversations about, you know, are they defenseless? Are they shipwrecked? So… I am told yes, other than the word of Admiral Bradley, I don’t have any independent confirmation of that.
Jen Rubin
Now, seeing what you see. Evan Bradley looking at this, does he say with a straight face that this was acceptable? I mean, how does he recognize the understanding in international law, so clear, and then looking at that. How does he, as an experienced admiral who’s been in this role for a while, has conducted innumerable special operations. How does he look at that and say, that’s okay?
Adam Smith
I can answer that. And yes, Admiral Bradley has… he was the JSOC commander for a while. He has ordered, as he said, hundreds, probably more than a thousand of these strikes in different parts of the world. Now, first thing is they were not at the point that they were struck trying to flip the boat back over. So let’s just dismiss that. Also, they had no communications devices. We have no evidence that they attempted to communicate, or they weren’t in a position to communicate with anyone, so you can’t argue, and Admiral Bradley didn’t argue that they were trying to flip the boat over and continue on in that regard, so what you’ve heard from Senator Cotton and some others is simply false. That is not an accurate depiction of what was going on in the boat. Now, bear with me as I make this argument for you. So, and this ties back into the larger mission. So, the mission was to kill all 11 people on the boat and destroy the cocaine. Minor little sub-point, by the way, there’s all this, you know, attacking the Washington Post for misreporting that he gave a kill everyone order. Well, that depends on how you look at it. There were 11 people on the boat, and the order was Kill them all. It was not a capture or detain. So, it is not inaccurate for whoever in the Pentagon leaked to the Washington Post, he said, kill everyone. That’s not inaccurate. Now, it’s a little unfair, in the sense that when you say that, it implies that, okay, you’ve got 5 people in an apartment building with 100 others, just blow the whole thing up, I don’t care. The 11 people who were contained in that killed them all, were deemed to be legitimate targets as affiliates of one of these narco-terrorist groups. Also. The order was not no survivors. It didn’t say, no matter the situation, kill them all. So… but, the order was to kill all 11 people on the boat. So you got 2 left surviving. The argument starts with the fact that The belief that the cocaine on that boat could have somehow survived that initial strike, and was conceivably in the bow of the boat, beneath you know, what we can see, the part under the water. Now, I find that fantastical in the first place, because a boat, you see the first strike, whole thing’s on fire. It breaks in half, it goes down. Is it possible that some drugs were contained underneath? I suppose it’s possible, but it’s highly unlikely. But even worse than that, the notion is That cocaine still could have gotten to the United States, and they’re treating that cocaine like it’s a weapon. Basically, they’re treating that image of those two people on that boat like a situation where, I don’t know, you see a car bomb headed towards an embassy or something. It’s struck, it seems like it’s incapacitated, but is it incapacitated? We don’t know, there’s still a couple people there. Maybe they can complete the mission, maybe they can get that bomb to the building and blow it up. And that, too, is kind of absurd, alright? Even if there is some cocaine in that boat, they are in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea with no power of locomotion, no communication devices. They are drifting with the current. A fact, by the way, that Admiral Bradley admitted, okay? That they weren’t… but his argument was. The boat could have conceivably drifted somewhere, where some other, you know, people associated with this drug cartel could have met up with them and continued the mission. That is the argument, alright? Treating the cocaine like it is a full-scale weapon.
Jen Rubin
And when you asked Admiral Bradley, do you really believe that, or what percentage, or what likelihood would that have happened? Does he acknowledge that this is To put it mildly, an attenuated or far-fetched Potentially.
Adam Smith
And there were a couple of moments in the conversation that stand out on that, when Senator Wicker was quizzing Admiral Bradley about the definition of shipwreck, which, by the way.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Adam Smith
thing that’s in the law of war. You know, you’re not supposed to be able to kill survivors of a, quote, shipwreck. Well, what’s a shipwreck? You know, and they were talking about what it looks like, what it doesn’t look like, and the other thing, and I interrupted them to say, because the image was still on the picture behind us, they’d paused the video with the two guys on the boat, I said, if you asked your 100 people, average people on the street, shipwreck and show… They would say, That. That’s what a shipwreck looks like. You know, a broken apart, overturned boat with two people clinging to it. And he said, well, that’s, you know, that’s why it’s so important to explain the context. So to answer your question, yes, Admiral Bradley is committed to this idea that somehow that boat might have still had cocaine on it, they might have been able to hook up with someone to, quote, continue their mission, and that they were still, quote, in the fight, which… poses, well, what is the fight, exactly? Are we saying anybody who has some amount of drugs on them, cocaine in this case, is a legitimate target for a kill order? And that gets into the broader issues around the policy, but yes, they are committed to this argument. Now, personally. You know, the legal opinion came out 3 days after this. You know, a month later, they had a similar situation with two people at sea that they chose to rescue. That’s the other aspect of this. So let’s say that the cocaine is a weapon. Two people in a boat, middle of nowhere, no evidence that anyone is within hundreds of miles of them who could help them. We had assets in the region. I’m not going to get into.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Adam Smith
We could have easily come in with a helicopter and plucked these two guys off the top of that boat, and done what we wanted with that boat. So, I don’t think that this order was justified.
Jen Rubin
Yes. Now, to that, element. was the Secretary of Defense And we’ve heard variations of this story. What was his visibility into what was going on on September 2nd? Was he there for all of it, for some of it, for none of it? What did he see, and what, if anything, do you know he said during the strike?
Adam Smith
We don’t know what he said. According to both Secretary Hagseth, though he’s been a little inconsistent in his descriptions here, and Admiral Bradley. Secretary Hegseth was there for the initial strike, you know, for tracking, okay, we got this word out, we got people going here, they’re going there, tracking it on the boat, and, you know, was there when the decision was made for the first strike. Secretary Hegseth says that after that first strike, you know, everything’s on fire, smoke all over the place, he left. And he did not track it from that point forward, gave no order. Though he does say he supports the order that Admiral Bradley gave. But it’s really important if you go back to the press secretary, Levitt, Carolyn Levitt, I think, when she read that carefully prepared statement a week ago in answer to a question that was basically a CYA for Hagseth. Yes. That, hey, he didn’t have anything to do with it, and as I like, to put it, he said, I 100% support the order that that guy gave. Wasn’t mean. And the Pentagon, people in the Pentagon, I have heard rumors. They’re kind of pissed about this. Yeah. Mr. Tough beat the chest, you know, we’re gonna be warriors, I’ve got your back, let’s go kill, let’s fight. Not me, I’m out, that’s them. So… Hank Seth’s gonna push you to do stuff that is on the boundaries of the law, and then he’s gonna bail if it goes sideways. Right, right. That’s another problem.
Jen Rubin
Now, let’s talk about the broader issues, which include the following. How can you legitimately claim that cocaine is a weapon? Secondly. according to at least a letter from the Coast Guard sent to Senator Paul, the Coast Guard has been interdicting cocaine pretty regularly, pretty effectively. Some of these people are transporting cocaine? Some of these people are doing nothing illegally. But you interdict them, there has not been, or there was not used, any kind of lethal force by the Coast Guard. And that has never been the way we’ve interdicted drugs. And then the third question that looms is. Why are we really doing this? Is this all a precursor to a war that would make the Iraq war look legitimate and justified? In other words, is this all setting us up for a regime change war against Venezuela?
Adam Smith
It’s broader than that. Let’s separate this into three categories. One, legitimate concern. We’ve got a drug problem in the U.S. A drug problem that has accelerated since the introduction of fentanyl, which has a higher overdose death rate, certainly than cocaine, than a variety of other drugs. This has nothing to do with fentanyl. Remember that. This is all cocaine, no fentanyl down there. They’ll try to say fentanyl at every step. In fact, I had to stop Admiral Bradley a couple times when he mentioned, I said, this… don’t say the word fentanyl, it doesn’t have anything to do with fentanyl. Okay, so we do have drugs. What should we do about that drug problem in general? So we can talk about that. Second, you know, do we want to obey the law, or is one of our options, in terms of dealing with drugs, to go, sort of, forgive me, all due tarte on the problem, and just kill a bunch of people? No due process, no, it’s like, drugs are a problem, therefore, we’re not going to take any chances. We think you’re a drug dealer, we’re going to use lethal force on you. That is directly contradictory to the U.S. Constitution and the way we’re supposed to do things, but we’re gonna have that conversation. But the big thing that’s going on here is Trump’s desire to consolidate power in his hands, number one, and number two, to dominate the Western Hemisphere in a 19th century sphere of influence sort of way, alright? The drugs, I don’t think, are central to what he’s doing. You’ve got the pardon of the former Honduran president as evidence, which, by the way, that pardon seems to be tied to Trump’s desire to affect the outcome the elections in Honduras, so that a pro-Trump person can be elected. And this goes back to, we’re going to invade Greenland, because it’s part of our sphere of influence, we’re going to invade Panama, we’re going to annex Canada. It’s this 19th century way of looking at the world. So I think this is about Trump wanting to, A, show, again, law doesn’t apply to him. He’s president, he does what he wants to do. If he can push the boundaries of that and smash him, then that opens up more power for him to do what he wants, and second, that he will be able to control the Western Hemisphere. Maduro is not on his positive list there, neither is Petro in Colombia, so he wants to put pressure on them. ultimately, hopefully do regime change in both places so we can have a more sympathetic leader down there, and that’s what this is about. And we’ve talked about the Honduras person. I keep trying to bring up, no one seems to want to take this up, you remember Ross Albrecht, the Silk Road crypto guy? This guy basically used the secret nature of cryptocurrency and a secure app to launder billions of dollars in drug money and other illegal, illicit activity as well, but that’s what he was convicted of. He was laundering drug money. That guy had every little bit as much to do with spreading drugs across the United States of America as Maduro or these 24 anarcho-terrorist groups did. Trump pardoned him. You know, because he was a political supporter, and he’d promised the crypto goons that he’d do that. So… you know, this doesn’t, to my mind, have a lot to do with interdicting the drug problem in the U.S. It has to do with asserting Trump’s power personally, so he doesn’t have to obey the law. And second, his whole sphere of influence. And then, to make my friend Simon Rosenberg happy, I always tie this in to Ukraine. All right. Why did he offer up a surrender agreement to Putin? And why in the national security strategy does a threat from Russia not even mention? Okay, we crap all over Europe in that for a variety of different reasons. Don’t even see Putin as a threat, because if Trump gets his Western Hemisphere, what does he care if Putin gets his Eastern Europe? And that… and then I could go off on a long conversation about how we developed our national security policy to change all of that. To come up with post-World War II rules-based order that tried to respect sovereignty, tried to get us out of the business of, as was aptly described by somebody, I don’t remember who said it, you know, the strong take what they want, the weak suffer what they must. That was the world prior to the end of World War II. And that world led to endless wars, terrible poverty, mass death, 70 million people died in World War II at the culmination of that way of looking at the world. No rules, just power. That’s the world that Trump wants to create, and that’s what this is about a hell of a lot more than it is the impact that cocaine being shipped into the United States is having, which is admittedly very negative and something we ought to do about. I have ideas on how we should actually address that issue, but like I said, it’s really more about the power dynamic.
Jen Rubin
What do your Republican colleagues think of all this? It is It’s hard to imagine that Senator Wicker, who has been in this a long time, is comfortable with a lot of this. And after all, Donald Trump didn’t rise to power in large part because he invaded against wars of choice and regime change and all the rest of it. Are they disturbed, and are they prepared to do anything about it?
Adam Smith
Well, I think the easiest way is, well, what do they think about it? They’re trying not to think about it. And I think there are a couple of things in particular that do sort of push them into action and do disturb them. They are disturbed by the notion of giving Ukraine to Putin. Very disturbed about that. Disturbed about the U.S. allowing it to happen. So, to the extent that that comes up, they start to get a little twitchy. The second thing that they’re starting to be disturbed about is the degree to which Trump wants a unilateral government. He doesn’t want Congress. You know, I mentioned the execute orders that they don’t send us. That’s tip of the iceberg. They are not briefing us, informing us, including us, allowing us to do our oversight to an unprecedented degree. And, you know, the drawdowns in Europe. They did that unilaterally, without talking, even after people like Chairman Wicker and Chairman Rogers had directly expressed the opinion that that shouldn’t happen. So they start to get frustrated when Trump is ignoring Congress. But overarching that, you know, Trump still controls the party. he controls the party, he has the power. I think there are two things that give them pause to really go after Trump and try to stop him. One is the political reality of Trump’s power and hold over the Republican Party. Second is their shared belief that the far left is a definite threat to the America that they want to see. And… and… they’re not 100% wrong about that, okay? There are some issues. They’re concerned about open borders. They’re concerned about what happened during the Biden administration in terms of asylum blowing, you know, the doors off everything. They’re concerned about policies that don’t deal with crime. They’re concerned about radical identity politics. And if they see Trump as the one person who’s standing up against that, you know, they are reluctant To challenge him for those reasons.
Jen Rubin
Does the fact that Donald Trump’s power is beginning to ebb away, that he is increasingly unpopular, that all his policies are unpopular, has that begun to diminish this kind of loyalty? And does the fact of this incident, which, as we’ve talked about, is not the totality of the issue, but is the one visible little thread that We can pull on. Has that changed the equation for any of them?
Adam Smith
nudged it slightly, and I think the most important thing we can do, and I was just out at the Reagan Defense Forum, and I had a good opportunity on the main panel at the start of this. We have to relentlessly put pressure on them on these issues. You know, we have to point out, you know, are you really okay with Donald Trump, you know, saying that we should hang United States Senators because they restate the actual law that’s in the UCMJ? Are you okay with them completely not obeying the law in terms of oversight for Congress. Are you okay with the surrender to Putin? You know, we have to keep making these arguments. Are you okay with these tariffs that, number one, were illegally put in place, and number two, are undermining the U.S. all across the globe, causing prices to let you domestically? Now. I don’t have this vision, you know, it’s not like a Mr. Smith goes to Washington moment when he stands up and gives that impassioned speech, and everyone goes, damn, you’re right, I’m wrong, I’m sorry. That moment probably isn’t going to happen, but you keep push it, okay? And it undermines the political support for Trump, and it undermines the political support for the people who are sucking up to him, and just let… and so we start winning more elections. We start turning the country around. And at what point in that whole process does a group of Republicans finally, you know, stand up to Trump, you know, vote to repeal the tariffs? I don’t know. There’s so many issues out there, you know, vote to say, no, we’re not going to use the National Guard as a domestic police force. And by the way. I met with the National Guard head in Washington State. They don’t have any money for training. our guard units, because all of that money is going to send the people to DC and Los Angeles and Chicago and Memphis and New Orleans. You know, they are falling further and further behind in terms of making sure that they can keep their force ready, because Trump’s stealing all that money for an unlawful domestic law enforcement mission. So we gotta keep pushing on all of that, and hope that…
Jen Rubin
Excellent.
Adam Smith
around, and the piece that I always say is we also have to govern better, those of us on the left side. As I said, I think there are some legitimate concerns about the way the left has governed. Certainly, cities like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere. And I think we oughta say, yeah, we got it, we’re gonna do better, but we’re gonna do better so that we don’t have to live with the terribleness that is what Trump is doing.
Jen Rubin
Let me end with a simple question. If Trump can get away with this on the high seas. Is there anything that’s going to prevent him from doing it here in the United States? What if he starts giving an order to the National Guard, if you see drug smugglers, or here’s a list of drug smugglers, go kill them, because that cocaine is a weapon and it’s here on our shores? Is there any distinction that you would make?
Adam Smith
Well, there’s no…
Jen Rubin
There’s a recipe for the vet.
Adam Smith
There are distinctions, but you’re right, because keep in mind, the goal here is for Trump to eliminate all of that, so that he can decide what he wants to do, and do it when he wants to do it. You know, he can move money around, he can cancel programs, spend money over here, give a tax rebate if he feels like it, all outside of the normal bounds of the legislative executive balance. So he wants to be able to have the power to do that if he sees fit, and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise. I mean, can you imagine a scenario where Donald Trump wants to do something, and then says, oh, but that’s not legal, so we can’t, we gotta come up with another angle. No, he’s gonna push that envelope as hard as he can. There is one other layer before you get to the domestic issue, and that gets back to the regime change issue. Right now. Getting people in international waters. What if we decide to strike the sovereign territory of another country, either at sea or on land? Would he be constrained to do that? I mean, that… that’s an act of war by international, you know, legal standards, and certainly we’ve done it before. We’ve never done it without congressional authorization. So, yes, there is a distinct risk of that. And every time I hear these people saying. Oh, so you just don’t care about the drug problem in the U.S? I care about the drug problem in the U.S, but do you want to give the President of the United States the power to execute people without due process? He might not be executing drug dealers to begin with. That’s why we have due process. That’s why.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Adam Smith
things like probable cause, you know, to make sure that it is legal and that people’s rights are protected. And finally, just as I said, you know, well, what should we do about it? You know, Plan Columbia is something that actually worked reasonably well. We worked with Columbia as a partner.
Jen Rubin
That’s.
Adam Smith
some odd years ago, congressionally approved, not us coming in, just blowing stuff up, and for about a decade, maybe a little longer, there was a significant reduction in cocaine coming out of Colombia and in the U.S. If we really want to get after this problem. We gotta find partners. We gotta find partners in Mexico, partners in Colombia, and elsewhere to really work to get after this. We gotta put pressure on China to stop the precursors. I raised that issue a number of times when I was in China two months ago. There’s things we can do that aren’t just blowing boats up in the middle of the ocean or the Caribbean, which isn’t really having a dramatic impact. on… I mean, people are still getting cocaine in the United States of America, and they will for quite some time, so there are smarter ways to do this, and again, not primarily about drugs, primarily about Trump wanting to assert his power in a wide variety of ways.
Jen Rubin
Congressman, thank you so much. This has been, enlightening, to say the least, and I would only encourage you and your colleagues to keep saying this, to keep informing the American people, to keep at it. Because, as you know, in this fog of disinformation and propaganda and lies and nonsense. it is hard to get out the truth. But again, thank you for what you are doing, and thank you for joining us. We will have you back. As this unfolds,
Adam Smith
Yeah, and one big thing, one simple thing, push to release the video. They cannot.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely.
Adam Smith
They cannot defend this video if people see it. That’s simple, that’s easy for people to understand. Push to release the video, we ought to be able to see it.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, absolutely. Nothing like seeing. Seeing who’s believing. So, thank you so much, Congressman. We’ll look forward to having you back.
Adam Smith
Great to see you.
