Rep. Mike Turner

One high-ranking Republican member of the House of Representatives is now saying that President Donald Trump's administration is acting outside its own established legal boundaries, if recent reporting about a September strike is to be believed.

The Washington Post reported recently that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Admiral Frank M. Bradley to carry out a secondary strike on survivors clinging to the wreckage of a boat the U.S. military destroyed on September 2, 2025. If true, that would likely be a violation of rules 46 and 47 of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which ban "no-quarter" orders and firing on anyone who is considered hors de combat ("out of the fight"), respectively.

In a Monday segment on CNN, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) — who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and who used to chair the House Intelligence Committee — told host Erin Burnett that his committee is currently making inquiries about the attack with the Department of Defense. He added that if the report is true, it would directly conflict the administration's own legal justification for the strikes themselves.

"The legal opinion that was provided to Congress and the justification that the administration is utilizing ... does not support the operations ... of this second strike," Turner said. "So that's why we have to give it critical review to determine what actually happened, because it's very serious here, as to the divergence between the legal justification that the department was operating under and then what could have occurred here."

In addition to Turner's committee, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) also announced in a joint statement that their committee would be conducting its own inquiry with the Pentagon. Turner called the allegations "very serious," and further denounced Hegseth for making light of it in a cartoon he posted to his official X account.

"I was obviously very disappointed and I thought it was very inappropriate that a cartoon would be used in this manner of something that's obviously very serious," Turner said.

Watch the segment below:

- YouTube www.youtube.com