It isn’t just the left that is outraged about Pete Hegseth’s role in the lethal “double-tap” airstrike of a suspected drug boat that killed all remaining survivors. A growing chorus of conservatives has joined them in describing the defense secretary as a potential “war criminal” who is “incompetent” and should be prosecuted.
With the Trump administration leaping into damage control mode and Hegseth looking to pin the blame on a subordinate over reports that the Pentagon chief gave the order to “kill everybody” during the first Venezuelan boat strike, bipartisan groups of lawmakers announced they are launching investigations of the follow-up strike and the Caribbean operation.
With both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees having already pressed the administration and Pentagon for the legal rationale for the military campaign against supposed “narco terrorists” that has left dozens dead, the Washington Post’s story on Hegseth's demand to kill survivors has now sparked Congressional inquiries.
The reliably conservative and hawkish editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch, applauded the bipartisan push for answers in an op-ed on Tuesday. On top of that, the editors called on Hegseth – a former Fox News morning talk show host – to take questions in a Congressional hearing.
“But the charge of deliberately killing the defenseless is serious enough to warrant a close look from Congress. That includes Mr. Hegseth giving an account under oath,” the editorial board wrote. “The Administration so far seems to think it can ride out the story with ritual denunciations of the media.”
Former colleagues of Hegseth’s, meanwhile, were far more forceful in their repudiation of the one-time Fox & Friends Weekend anchor.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, who spent nearly a decade working alongside Hegseth at Fox, didn’t mince words Tuesday over Hegseth’s alleged actions. “This is an act of a war crime, ordering survivors who the law requires be rescued instead to be murdered,” Napolitano said on Newsmax. “There's absolutely no legal basis for it.”
At the same time, the right-wing legal analyst declared that the entire chain of command that was involved in the follow-up strike “should be prosecuted for a war crime,” adding that it “doesn’t make any sense” for the White House to justify the double-tap as an act of “self-defense.”
Indeed, in her first press briefing after the Washington Post first reported on Hegseth’s alleged “kill everybody” order, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the second strike on the remaining survivors “was conducted in self-defense to protect Americans” and “vital United States interests.” It was also during that briefing that Leavitt said that it was Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley – who leads the Joint Special Operations Command – who issued the order to fire on the remains of the vessel a second time.
Another one-time cohort of Hegseth’s, Fox News analyst and National Review writer Andrew McCarthy, also took the defense secretary to task over the Washington Post’s story.
“If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law,” McCarthy wrote over the weekend. “I say ‘at best’ because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict.”
In recent weeks, it was revealed that Trump’s Justice Department had claimed in a legal memo that military personnel involved in the deadly strikes on alleged drug-running boats wouldn’t face criminal prosecution. However, experts on conflict have said the “just following orders” defense may not hold water with later administrations or federal judges, who could find the campaign illegal and still leave troops and Pentagon officials exposed to criminal liability.
In the wake of the bombshell report, Hegseth has predictably called it “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory reporting” from the “fake news” while also justifying the legality of the second strike and the campaign as a whole, saying the “current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law” and have been “approved by the best military and civilian lawyers.”
At the same time, he has gone out of his way to pass the buck and scapegoat Bradley for the killing of survivors. “Let’s make one thing crystal clear,” Hegseth tweeted on Monday. “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100 percent support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made – on the September 2 mission and all others since.”
Longtime Fox News pundit and anchor Brit Hume called out his former colleague for seemingly throwing Bradley under the bus, cheekily replying that this was “how to point a finger at someone while pretending to support him.”
During Tuesday’s off-the-rails Cabinet meeting, Hegseth continued to keep the target on Bradley’s back.
“I watched that first strike live, as you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do, so I didn't stick around ... a couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made ... the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” Hegseth said, adding that he “did not personally see survivors” after the first strike as it was part of the “fog of war.”
Conservative columnist George Will, meanwhile, railed against the “sickening moral slum” of the Trump administration while taking specific aim at Hegseth.
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.”
Over on Capitol Hill, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) – who has been vocally critical of the administration’s boat strikes and has cosponsored resolutions to block unauthorized military action against Venezuela – blasted the Pentagon chief as either a liar or a buffoon over his response to the reports about the second strike.
“Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this, and it did not happen. It was fake news. It didn’t happen. And then the next day, from the podium at the White House are saying it did happen,” Paul told reporters on Tuesday. “So, either he was lying to us … or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”
The senator added: “Do we think there’s any chance that … the secretary of the defense did not know there had been a second strike? So as a country, we’re just going to let people lie to us, to our face?”
Paul also said that it appeared Hegseth was trying to “pin the blame” on Bradley, noting that he didn’t “like to see political figures pointing their finger at military figures” while observing that “there’s a question about … when they don’t take orders, whether things are legal or not legal.” Trump and his allies have recently accused a group of Democrats of sedition for urging troops not to follow illegal orders, suggesting that the “Seditious Six” should be “hanged” for treason. (Ironically, Hegseth said in 2016 that soldiers “won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief.”)
Though Hegseth is facing some condemnation from conservative media figures and lawmakers, many of his pals at his old stomping grounds have made it clear that they have his back.
“The liberal media's going hog wild over the coke boat hoax,” Fox News primetime star Jesse Watters exclaimed on Tuesday night. “The cartel cruiser chock-full of poison in the Caribbean Sea that our military smoked on September 2 and then double-tapped as two alleged narco-terrorists clung to the wreckage.”
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, a self-styled libertarian who has previously described the “War on Drugs” as a failure while calling for drug legalization, celebrated the killing of survivors in the ocean. “It's just better for us to kill them in the ocean, make them shark feed, be done with it. Merry Christmas,” he proclaimed.
Furthermore, the Pentagon has ensured that Hegseth and his team won’t be directly pressed with any tough questions about this brewing scandal.
In its first press briefing in months, and following the exile of the vast majority of the Pentagon press corps over Hegseth’s loyalty pledge demand, Defense Department spokesperson Kingsley Wilson cheerfully took the podium and welcomed a spate of MAGA influencers and propagandists. Needless to say, she encountered nothing but softballs from the pro-Trump “journalists,” who let her off the hook on the double-tap strike.
Meanwhile, Hegseth sat down for a chummy conversation with former Trump official Katie Miller, the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller who has kicked off a fledgling career as a podcaster and MAGA pundit. While he faced no questions about the alleged “kill everybody order” or Signalgate, Hegseth was pressed on which TV shows he’s binge-watching and his favorite types of chicken wings.
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