The White House on Monday confirmed that a Navy admiral overseeing the bombings of alleged “drug boats” ordered an attack on survivors of an initial strike in September. That commander, Admiral Frank Bradley of Special Operations Command, directed the attack after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “authorized” the broader operation. 

Last week, the Washington Post first reported that Mr. Hegseth gave the order to kill any survivors of a “drug boat” bombing in the Caribbean as the boat was leaving Venezuela. There were 11 people on board the vessel, and two individuals survived the initial strike. Mr. Hegseth is alleged to have ordered that both of those survivors be killed, though the White House says that it was Admiral Bradley who specifically ordered that second strike once given control of the operation by Mr. Hegseth.

After days of pushing back on the reporting without explicitly denying the facts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday confirmed that the strikes had taken place following Mr. Hegseth’s authorization for the use of lethal force against anyone on board the alleged drug boats. 

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narco-terrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters Monday. “With respect to the strikes in question, on September 2nd, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes.”

Ms. Leavitt argued that Admiral Bradley acted “well within his authority and the law” in order to “ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

“This administration has designated these narco-terrorists as foreign terrorist organizations. The president has a right to take them out if they are threatening the United States of America and if they are bringing illegal narcotics that are killing our citizens at a record rate,” Ms. Leavitt said. 

For days, top spokesmen for the administration had been denying that the second strike on survivors ever took place, whether by Mr. Hegseth’s orders or otherwise. 

“We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday. These people just fabricate anonymously sourced stories out of whole cloth,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X Friday. “Fake News is the enemy of the people.”

“The Washington Compost provided NO FACTS and NO SUBSTANTIATION. They literally just printed what some unnamed random person said and reported it as fact,” White House communication director Steven Cheung wrote on X Sunday. “This is the same playbook they used during the first term. The difference is that nobody trusts outlets like WaPo anymore.”

On Monday, after reporters noted that administration officials were denying the facts surrounding the Caribbean strike, Mr. Cheung walked back his earlier statement, saying that the administration was only denying the “narrative” of the original Washington Post story. 

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees along with their Democratic counterparts have said they are launching investigations into the incident. 

“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,” the House Armed Services Committee chairman and ranking members, Congressmen Mike Rogers and Adam Smith, said in a statement Saturday. 

Senator Roger Wicker and Jack Reed — the Republican chairman and Democratic ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee — said Friday that they will be launching “inquiries” into the bombing. They promised that oversight of the Defense Department would be “vigorous.”

On his way to Washington, D.C., from Florida on Sunday, President Trump told reports aboard Air Force One that Mr. Hegseth personally told him that he did not order the second strike on the boat in September. The president also said that he would not have ordered that bombing had he been aware of it. 

“I wouldn’t have wanted that — not a second strike,” Mr. Trump said Sunday.