The U.S. admiral whose strikes on an alleged drug-running boat have drawn bipartisan scrutiny and prompted accusations of possible war crimes told lawmakers on Thursday he was not ordered to kill everyone on board.

The assurance by Admiral Frank Bradley, confirmed by key lawmakers from both parties, that there was no “kill all” order appeared to tamp down GOP pushback on the Sept. 2 strikes even as Democrats expressed alarm by what they heard and saw in the classified briefing.

The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a spoken order to kill everybody on board the vessel, prompting bipartisan investigations into the matter.

The White House confirmed the U.S. military ordered a second strike against a suspected drug trafficking vessel in the Caribbean Sea, and said that the order for the second strike came from Bradley and not Hegseth. White House and Pentagon officials have insisted it was a lawful use of force.

At a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth said he wasn’t in the room when the second strike was ordered.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said after the briefing it was clear the two survivors of the first strike “were trying to continue on their mission and remain on the battlefield.”

“Admiral Bradley and Secretary Hegseth did exactly what you would expect them to do,” Cotton said, adding that he supports the administration continuing its boat strikes. “It’s not Congress’s role to sharp shoot every single tactical decision,” he added.

But Senator Jack Reed, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he was “deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning,” and called for a release of complete and unedited footage of the second strike.

“This briefing confirmed my worst fears,” Reed said in a statement. “This must and will be the only beginning of our investigation into this incident.”

In the House, Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the Intelligence panel, told reporters the video showed an attack on shipwrecked sailors.

“The admiral confirmed that there had not been been a “kill them all” order and that there was no order to grant no quarter,” Himes said. Nonetheless, he said the unedited video of the strikes was “one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service.”

“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States,” Himes said.

Despite the pressure and increased scrutiny, Hegseth’s position appears to be safe, at least for the time being, with President Donald Trump continuing to praise his defense secretary after a series of controversies, including the accidental inclusion of a journalist into a group chat on the Signal messaging app discussing military strikes on Yemen.

The Pentagon inspector general determined that Hegseth had the authority to declassify the information he’d sent — which was originally labeled “secret” — but that his use of a personal cell phone risked compromising sensitive information about the upcoming attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen, it said in a report released Thursday.

Hegseth himself has doubled down on the strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean off the coast of Venezuela, and said he stood by military commanders.

“We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,” Hegseth told reporters on Tuesday.

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