By Katie Bo Lillis, Ellis Kim, Morgan Rimmer, Annie Grayer, CNN

(CNN) — Two top House lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.

“Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys, but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” said Connecticut Democrat Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. “Yes, they were carrying drugs. They were not in the position to continue their mission in any way.”

But the panel chairman, Republican Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, said that he thought the second strike was justified.

“We shouldn’t be surprised when we send folks to do a mission, when they do their mission,” Crawford said.

In what has been the most significant congressional scrutiny of President Donald Trump’s military campaign in the Caribbean, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley is on Capitol Hill on Thursday for a round robin of private meetings with lawmakers of both parties to defend the secondary strike on the ship.

Most Republicans have signaled support for the overall campaign, which has killed more than 80 people and which a broad range of outside legal experts have argued is likely unlawful. But the Sept. 2. strike has drawn bipartisan scrutiny as a potential war crime — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight.

When the initial hit on the vessel did not sink it, CNN and others have previously reported, the military then carried out a second strike that killed survivors.

It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.”

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

The Defense Department has been making the case for the follow-up strike by arguing that the survivors were still “in the fight” and defense officials have said that they radioed for help. If they had been rescued, they could have theoretically continued trafficking drugs, according to US officials briefed on the strikes.

Bradley was expected to make a similar case to lawmakers today, CNN has previously reported. The meeting with Himes and Crawford was his first of the day.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in law of war issues and is among those who believe the administration is unlawfully treating civilians as enemy combatants without an authorization for war, dismissed the department’s argument.

“Even if you were to assume there was an armed conflict and further assume that these people could be targeted in the first instance, they don’t forfeit their status as ‘shipwrecked’ by calling for help based on the speculation that the rescuers could salvage some of the cargo,” he said. “That would blow a huge hole in the protection for the shipwrecked…. If anytime you called for help, you lost your ‘shipwrecked’ status, there would be no protections there.”

The precise timeline of the twin strikes — as well as who ordered them — have been a shifting point of scrutiny since reports of the second strike first emerged in the press over the weekend.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his spokespeople initially railed against reporting of the second strike, with Hegseth calling it “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting.” Just days later, however, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt confirmed the second strike occurred, and said Bradley was the one who ordered it.

Himes said Thursday that the admiral told lawmakers Hegseth did not issue an order to “kill them all.” CNN previously reported that a source familiar with the strikes said that Defense secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to ensure everyone on the boat was killed, but it was not clear if he knew there were survivors before a second strike was carried out.

During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth said that he observed the initial strike on the boat but then left to attend other meetings and learned about the second strike hours later.

Asked if he was told that Hegseth ordered the second strike on a suspected drug boat in September after the original strike did not kill everyone on board, Crawford said it was his “understanding” that Bradley had ordered the strike.

“I feel confident and have no further questions of Hegseth,” Crawford told CNN.

But the precise language of Hegseth’s orders surrounding the Sept. 2 strike — or the more than 20 others that the military has carried out — remain unclear.

This is a developing story and will be updated

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