But the narrative was salacious for the very same reason it was highly unlikely. "Everybody was watching," said Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) after a classified briefing Thursday. "Everybody had seen the intelligence and legal basis leading up to these strikes."

"Most Americans are not aware" that "there are legal advisers standing next to most of the military operators, giving them advice to help them navigate what's legal and what is not," explained FRC president Tony Perkins, a practice dating especially from America's drone warfare in Afghanistan.

Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a military veteran who retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, concurred on "Washington Watch." "When I was in the Pentagon, the three-stars and the four-stars [high-ranking generals] said, 'I don't sign a single piece of paper that the legal advisor has not looked at first,'" he said. "Make no mistake about it. They've had a legal advisor comment, and approve of legally, these actions."

Further revelations soon suggested that the real story was quite different from the one spun by the Post's anonymous sources. Secretary Hegseth had given no instructions about potential survivors of the drug boat strikes and did not even know about the survivors of the strike in question. The follow-up order actually came from Admiral Frank M. "Mitch" Bradley, and the Trump administration insisted he had reasons to justify his order.

Yet the nature of the revelations was such that Congress at least felt a duty to perform oversight of the strikes. On Thursday, Admiral Bradley came to Capitol Hill for classified briefings with senior members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, where lawmakers also viewed classified video footage from the September 2 attacks.

An unfortunate byproduct of classified briefings is that lawmakers are obligated not to spill details of what they learned, which means they can only relay general summaries of what transpired, and these soundbites inevitably skew toward their partisan ends. Thursday's hearing was no different; afterward, "as is par for the Washington course, opinions divide along partisan lines," observed former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, called the footage of the second strike "troubling," as it showed two men on a damaged boat in "clear distress, without any means of locomotion," he said.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) offered an opposite assessment. "There is no doubt in my mind about the highly professional manner in which the Department of War conducted, and is conducting, the operations our nation has called them to do," Crawford contended. "Those who appear 'troubled' by videos of military strikes on designated terrorists have clearly never seen the Obama-ordered strikes, or, for that matter, those of any other administration over recent decades."

But the various partisan accounts do bear one point of agreement. In fact, they agree on the essential point, the reason why Congress was holding hearings in the first place. "The admiral confirmed that there had not been a 'kill them all' order, and there was not an order to grant no quarter," Himes admitted after the hearing, before physically fleeing a reporter's follow-up question.

On "This Week on Capitol Hill," Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who participated in the Senate intelligence hearing, offered a complementary assessment. "No real new information came out of this, nothing that would question the legitimacy and the appropriateness of the president taking this action."

This must be devastating to President Trump's political enemies. As with Russiagate and similarly manufactured scandals, congressional Democrats have grown accustomed to using a poorly sourced media to justify a congressional investigation, which they then nurse along for as long as possible to taint the Trump administration with rumors of scandal. This time, however, Democrats staged their fishing expedition in an unstocked pond, and Bradley's testimony delivered a death sentence to the war crimes narrative almost as soon as it was born.

Yet congressional Democrats are undeterred. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, insisted that the hearing was only the start of the investigation. "This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump administration's military activities and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation," Reed related.

Reed neglects to specify either his "worst fears" or what about the "nature" of Trump's drug boat strikes he dislikes. But his comment does represent a shift in focus from the narrow issue of potential war crimes—a tacit admission that there were none—to the larger issue of Trump's use of military force against drug traffickers. In particular, Reed alleges that the administration has withheld information from Congress, thus insinuating that they know their behavior is improper.

This new focus may prove more profitable, as the legal basis for the Trump administration's drug boat strikes is hazy. The Constitution explicitly invests the power to declare war with Congress, not the executive branch. In fact, disagreement over this point may be the reason why Secretary Hegseth asked four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey, who commanded the US fleet in the Caribbean, to abruptly step down in the midst of a tense situation (the reason for Holsey's resignation has not been explained).

Even some of Trump's congressional allies, who support his activity in the Caribbean, would be more comfortable if it had explicit authorization by Congress. "The Senate needs to stop whining about this. Stop complaining, and let's figure out how we can help Donald Trump," urged Self. "Why don't they put an AUMF on the floor, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, and let's go after the drug cartels?"

However, other Trump allies are perfectly comfortable with military strikes against boats smuggling drugs from South America. "President Trump was acting, in my view, well within his constitutional authority to protect the American people against foreign terrorists," argued Cornyn. To the president's critics, "I would say, 'Are you happy with the status quo before President Trump took this action, where tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to die from this poison? Or do you believe that we ought to do something about it?'"

Whatever the legal or prudential merits, Democrats in Congress seem determined to investigate the Trump administration's military action in the Caribbean, whether they can prove the media's narrative or not. "I don't think you'll ever satisfy the many of our liberal Democrats," Cornyn concluded, "who disagree with just about everything president does just because it's President Trump." Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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