President Donald Trump denied on Monday that he ever supported releasing video of the second strike on a suspected drug boat as controversy continues to swirl around the U.S. military’s actions in the Caribbean in early September.

Trump said last Wednesday that “whatever” Secretary Pete Hegseth’s War Department had, “we’d certainly release, no problem.” On Monday, however, the president told reporters at the White House that he never agreed to make the full video of the second strike public.

“Mr. President, you said you would have ‘no problem’ with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela,” one reporter stated.

“I didn’t say that,” the president replied. “You said that, I didn’t say that.”

Trump added, “Whatever Pete Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.”

Hegseth has come under fire from Democrats and some Republicans after the “double-tap” strike on a boat that the Trump administration said was trafficking illicit drugs to the United States. The administration released a 29-second unclassified video showing the first strike on September 2, but the full video of the follow-up strike has been shown to only a select few lawmakers.

Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to meet with top intelligence committee lawmakers on Tuesday behind closed doors. The Trump officials will likely be asked more questions about the “double-tap” strike during the meeting.

Trump told POLITICO in a wide-ranging interview released on Tuesday that he watched the footage of the second strike and continues to give Hegseth his full confidence.

“He’s doing a great job,” Trump said, adding that he doesn’t care if Hegseth testifies under oath about the strike.

The president said that the footage was “not pretty,” but added, “It looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat, but I don’t get involved in that.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on Sunday that he watched the footage of the second strike, adding that he would not have “any problem” with releasing the footage to the public.

“It’s not gruesome. I didn’t find it distressing or disturbing. It looks like any number of dozens of strikes we’ve seen on Jeeps and pickup trucks in the Middle East over the years,” Cotton said. He added that he would understand if the War Department had concerns about releasing the footage, since it could reveal too much to drug cartels about how the U.S. military is conducting the strikes.

Democrats who saw the footage are calling on the administration to release the video. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the footage of the second strike was “deeply disturbing.”

“There were two survivors on an overturned boat. When they were finally taken out, they weren’t trying to flip the boat over. The boat was clearly incapacitated,” Smith said. “A tiny portion of it remained capsized, the bow of the boat. They had no communications device. Certainly they were unarmed.”

“Any claim that the drugs had somehow survived that attack is hard to really square with what we saw,” he added. “So it was deeply disturbing. It did not appear that these two survivors were in any position to continue the fight.”

When asked if the War Department would release the additional footage, Hegseth said over the weekend that the administration is currently “reviewing the process,” and did not commit to releasing the full video.

“Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible about reviewing that right now,” Hegseth added.

After Trump ramped up border security upon returning to office, he moved his attention to preventing drugs from reaching American shores. The strikes on the suspected “narcoterrorists,” which began in September, have taken out 23 boats and 87 suspected drug runners.

Utah lawmakers will soon decide whether to keep laws in place protecting kids from transgender procedures. Their decision will be based in a large part on a report the Utah legislature commissioned — a report one watchdog says is “terribly flawed.”

Do No Harm on Tuesday released a memo highlighting the problems with a report commissioned by the Utah legislature on transgender procedures on kids. The memo, first shared with The Daily Wire, says that the report significantly misrepresents the scientific record and glosses over the danger of transgender procedures.

“Its shortcomings include failure to adhere to the fundamental standards of a systematic review, prioritizing the quantity of evidence over its quality, uncritically relying on guidelines from purported experts, overlooking significant life-altering adverse effects, and consulting advisors, some of whom support ‘gender-affirming care’ for minors,” Do No Harm medical director Kurt Micelli and gender ideology program director Michelle Havrilla write.

The May 2025 report, titled “Gender-Affirming Medical Treatments for Pediatric Patients with Gender Dysphoria,” was conducted by the Drug Regimen Review Center at the University of Utah and led by Dr. Joanne LaFleur. It was commissioned after Utah Republicans passed legislation in 2023 to shield kids from transgender procedures by putting a moratorium on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

The purpose of the report is to guide the Utah Department of Health’s recommendations to the legislature about whether to keep the ban on hormonal procedures in place. After an in depth review of the 1,000-page report, Do No Harm said that the legislature should ignore the Utah report, and instead rely on a Department of Health Health and Human Services review that found putting kids on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones damaged their development and comes with serious health risks.

“The Utah Report asserts that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are safe and effective amid a sea of weak evidence, data extraction by a single reviewer rather than at least two, and conclusions based primarily on narrative summaries rather than quantitative synthesis – all despite reaching conflicting findings from well-established systematic reviews available prior to the Utah Report’s submission,” Do No Harm writes in its memo.

This portrayal comes from a reliance on anecdotal stories and studies, and not a systematic review of all relevant studies. Micelli told The Daily Wire that the Utah Report was “terribly flawed” and “anything but” a systematic review, and did not conduct critical evaluation of the studies cited.

“Unlike true systematic reviews, it does not assess the reliability of studies and whether the research can provide guidance for weighing the risks and benefits of medical intervention for children with gender dysphoria,” the memo said.

Micelli and Havrilla write that the Utah report relied on observational studies as opposed to randomized control studies. The authors also pointed more to quantity over quality, they said.

At one point, the Utah authors wrote that “the amount of evidence available for treating pediatric [gender dysphoria] patients with [gender-affirming hormonal therapy] far exceeds the quantity that supported the use of [spinal muscular atrophy] gene therapy upon FDA approval.”

The gene therapy approval was based on objective testing while the transgender studies were based on subjective methods, Do No Harm warned.

The Utah authors also accepted the guidance of radical groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the Endocrine Society. Both these groups downplay the risks of transgender procedures on kids and endorse things like cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Micelli said that the Utah report treats the WPATH guidelines “as gospel” and offer “no critical evaluation.”

The Utah report takes “these guidelines at face value purely because they come from ‘organizations that are widely regarded as authorities in their given specialty’ and state ‘a risk-of-bias assessment was not conducted on guidelines as part of the current work because [the authors] restricted inclusion to recognized medical authorities who published evidence-based guidelines,'” the memo noted.

Both WPATH and the Endocrine Society make the dubious suggestion that it’s possible to reverse the effects of puberty blockers. This contradicts evidence that puberty blockers stunt bone development and have unknown neurological impacts.

Other well-documented problems with transgender procedures on kids are also downplayed, Do No Harm notes. For example, the risk of sexual dysfunction from cross-sex hormones is not mentioned and potential dangers to infertility are not included as an outcome of focus.

“They conclude that gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) is effective in improving mental health and psychosocial outcomes, whereas concerns related to bone health, cardiovascular risk, and cancer are ‘minimal and manageable.’ The Utah Report neglects significant adverse effects that are associated with GAHT, including the life-altering effects of infertility/sterility and sexual dysfunction.”

While the recommendations added on to report as claim that no position is being taken on whether to continue the moratorium on trans procedures, Micelli told The Daily Wire that is a contradictory claim. The recommendations are all contingent on the moratorium being lifted, Micelli said. These included things like setting up a board to oversee the moratorium, creating specific standards of care, and limiting those who prescribe transgender procedures to “demonstrated experts.”

Do No Harm also flagged multiple doctors recommended by the Utah report’s amendments as advisors to lawmakers for potential conflicts of interest. This included Nikki Mihalopoulos and Brooks Keeshin.

Mihapopoulos authored a 2021 article discussing how “pediatric health care providers can play a critical role in building solutions in policy and advocacy…to improve the health of transgender/gender diverse youth. Many government entities, especially at the state and local level, actively resist efforts promoting equal rights.”

Keeshin has written a “Clinical Perspective” highlighting Utah’s “potential pathway forward” for “open access to [gender-affirming] care” for adolescents and said that the protections created a “significant challenge to adolescents who would benefit from gender-affirming care as well as their healthcare providers.”