What happened
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday rebuffed bipartisan calls to release video of the military killing two survivors of a Sept. 2 missile strike on a speedboat allegedly carrying cocaine across the Caribbean. “We’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” he told reporters after a briefing for senators. And in Congress, only “appropriate committees will see it.”

Who said what
Hegseth and other top officials briefed the full House and Senate yesterday “amid bipartisan pressure for more transparency” and growing “questions about the nature and legality” of the boat strikes, The New York Times said. “Most Republicans exiting the briefing backed the Trump administration’s decision to limit access” to the full video, but Democrats said the administration’s excuse about protecting military secrets was undermined by the 20 boat strike clips it had already posted online, including of the initial Sept. 2 attack. “They just don’t want to reveal the part that suggests war crimes,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Lawmakers from both parties agreed the briefing “left them in the dark” about President Donald Trump’s “goals when it comes to President Nicolás Maduro” and Venezuela, The Associated Press said. Hegseth told reporters the boat bombing campaign was focused on eradicating cartels “poisoning the American people.” But White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.” 

What next?
Hegseth said the Pentagon would show the full, unedited video to the House and Senate armed services committees today. The Senate was “on the brink of giving final approval to a defense policy bill that would freeze” a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget “if he failed to give Congress unedited video of all the strikes, as well as the orders that led to them,” the Times said. 

What happened
The U.S. gained 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October, the Commerce Department reported yesterday, and the unemployment rate climbed to 4.6%, the highest since 2021. Along with the net loss of 41,000 jobs, the department also revised August and September’s payroll numbers downward by 33,000 jobs. Wages grew an anemic 0.1% last month, the smallest gain since 2023. The October jobs report was delayed because of the government shutdown.

Who said what
“Taken together,” the data released yesterday “point to one of the weakest American labor markets in years,” The Wall Street Journal said. Hiring has “clearly lost momentum,” The Associated Press said, “hobbled by uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s tariffs” and the “lingering effects” of inflation-fighting high interest rates. 

The “economy is flashing new warning signs,” but October’s steep losses “reflected the exit of tens of thousands of federal workers who took a deferred resignation package earlier this year,” The Washington Post said. “All roads lead back to policy out of Washington, D.C.,” RSM chief economist Joseph Brusuelas told the Journal. “I’m not saying this is a harbinger of a recession, but we have some real challenges to the economy that we didn’t have one year ago.”

What next?
The delayed jobs numbers, and a separate Commerce Department report yesterday that showed flat retail sales, “buttressed the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates last week,” the Post said. After that meeting, Fed Chair Jerome Powell “warned that official statistics could be overstating job creation by 60,000 jobs a month.”