Wednesday, December 3, 2025. Pete Hegseth was never qualified to become the Secretary of Defense but he appears to have earned the title War Criminal.
File it under "Goes to pattern," Jason Wilson (GUARDIAN) reports:
Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement.
The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on “American warfighters” by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions.
Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for a 2 September attack on a boat purportedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, where survivors of a first strike on the vessel were reportedly killed in a second strike following a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill everybody”.
Hegseth is a known liar and we've seen he can't take accountability. When he brought classified information into a non-secure chat, he just lied. War plan? That's not top secret! He's just a liar. He never grew up and became a man, he's just a little liar who thinks he can lie his way out of anything.
Alex Nguyen (MOTHER JONES) notes:
The apparent, coordinated effort to distance Hegseth from the September 2 boat strikes stems from an exclusive report from the Washington Post last week alleging that Hegseth ordered a follow-up strike on two people who had survived the initial bombing of their boat on September 2. The attack kicked off what has since exploded into an extended campaign of lethal hits on suspected drug boats from Venezuela, despite mounting evidence that casts doubt on the assertion that those killed were even trafficking drugs into the United States. According to tracking work from the New York Times, at least 80 people have been killed in 21 strikes.
Hegseth has since blasted the allegations as “fake news.” He also responded with his version of an apparent joke: a fake image of a Franklin the Turtle children’s book titled Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, with the titular character shown in military gear, firing at targets in the sea from a helicopter.
Kids Can Press, which has published many of the Franklin the Turtle books, condemned Hegseth’s post on Monday night, saying it contradicted its values of “kindness, empathy, and inclusivity.”
Lawmakers, including at least one top Republican, have indicated targeting shipwrecked survivors may constitute a war crime. (The Department of Defense’s own “Law of War Manual” prohibits “no quarter” declarations, which includes “conduct[ing] hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.”) Republican-led committees in the House and Senate have since announced investigations into the report.
The the thing about liars? They tend to lie after they lie and that's why Hegseth has a story that keeps changing. Back in September, for example, he was on FOX "NEWS" breathlessly detailing what he saw happen in real time. Now he's a little foggy on the events.
"There was no fog of war the morning after this happened," Joe Scarborough noted this morning on MS NOW's MORNING JOE.
That was then. Now? Pete, like his anus, is getting a little explosive which tends to happen when you talk out your ass. Edith Olmsted (THE NEW REPUBLIC) explains:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth absolutely lost it Tuesday as he scrambled to shirk responsibility for reportedly murdering the survivors of a September 2 drone strike on an alleged drug trafficking vessel in the Caribbean.
Sitting beside a drowsy Donald Trump during a lengthy Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that while he had been perfectly happy to take responsibility for the dozen extrajudicial executions of people who the government couldn’t prove were drug traffickers, he wouldn’t dare claim credit for that one Pentagon decision.
Instead, the war chief continued to redirect responsibility for the strike onto Commander Frank “Mitch” Bradley, and even the president himself.
“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 for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting,” Hegseth said.
“A couple of hours later I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do—and by the way Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”
Let's break away from Hegseth for a moment to note Donald at that cabinet meeting and his press conference. MEIDASTOUCH NEWS' Ben explains Chump
When the documents were unsealed, who was president? That's right: Donald Chump.
Why did he pardon the convicted drug trafficker? He'd rather lie about Joe Biden instead of answering that question. He keeps blaming Joe for everything and thinks we are all too stupid to notice.
They always need a fall guy, a scapegoat, because they never take accountability for their actions. It appears they are trying to frame Adm Frank M. Bradley for Pete Hegseth's War Crimes. Helene Cooper and John Ismay (NEW YORK TIMES) note:
On Thursday, he will head to Capitol Hill for closed-door sessions with lawmakers, as Republicans and Democrats express concerns about the Trump administration’s campaign.
At the time of the Sept. 2 attack, Admiral Bradley was beginning the last month of his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which conducts some of the military’s most secret missions, and preparing to assume the command of U.S. Special Operations Command, a job he took in October.
But now he has become a public example of the potential legal peril that the American military faces as it carries out the orders of President Trump and his defense secretary.
The president said that he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike on the boat survivors, and that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told him he did not order one.
Mr. Hegseth had previously said that he watched the operation live on video. But on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth said he “didn’t stick around” to see the second strike.
They're throwing the admiral under the bus. It's what they do to avoid accountability.
It seems like a lifetime ago but it was just last month that Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats did a PSA reminding that the law states you do not have to obey and illegal order (Uniform Code of Military Justice states that explicitly). And the response from Chump and his minions was to attack Kelly and the other five. To talk of putting Kelly to death. To insist he be brought back into the military to try to court-martial him.
In a fundraising appeal for the Democratic Party yesterday, Kelly noted:
If you can believe it, things didn’t stop when Trump called for my hanging. It didn’t stop with the threat of a court-martial from Pete Hegseth, either. Because now, the FBI has asked to question me and other members of Congress.
All for saying things the president didn’t like to hear.
If you’re feeling like this isn’t the country you grew up in, I don’t blame you. But I hope you aren’t giving up on it.
I certainly haven’t. This country has given me too much, and I’ll never be able to repay that debt. I still believe in our democracy, our values, and our Constitution.
There’s no chance in hell that somebody like Donald Trump is going to stop me from serving the people of this nation. None.
If he thought all of this was going to shut me up, he’s got another thing coming.
The topic's not going away. Last night, Rachel Maddow discussed it with Stephen Colbert on his CBS late night program.
That's just one program.
The White House appears to think this is going to die out and just fade away but that's not the case. Daniel Hampton (RAW STORY) reports:
Impeachment? That's really not a hard case to make against Pete Hegseth. Tom Nichols (THE ATLANTIC) notes:
Pete Hegseth, a Trump sycophant who served in the military, topped out at the mid-level rank of major, and left full of bitterness and resentment toward a military establishment that clearly didn’t value his brilliance and fortitude.
The halls of the Pentagon are apparently strewn with rakes these days, and Hegseth has managed to step on almost all of them, including security blunders, needless fights with the press, and envious, unmanly whining about the medals on the uniform of Senator Mark Kelly, a veteran of higher rank and far greater achievement than Hegseth himself. Like Trump, Hegseth thinks his job is to get even with people he views as enemies: When Hegseth pulled more than 800 senior officers into an auditorium to give them a long and pointless harangue, it was not only disrespectful; it was cringe-inducing, like watching the angriest kid in your high school come back 20 years later as the principal and unload his adolescent gripes on all the teachers in the staff lounge.
Now, however, Hegseth is in new and far more dangerous territory. The Washington Post reported last Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered the killing of the survivors of the first strike against what the administration says are terrorist-controlled drug boats. If this report is accurate, it means that Hegseth issued what is called a “no quarter” order, a crime in both American and international law.
So far, the president and the secretary have not disputed the facts, instead fumbling about with classic Beltway-style “non-denial denials.” Today, the White House admitted that the second strike did in fact take place, but on the orders of the Special Operations Command chief, Admiral Frank Bradley, which seems to be setting Bradley up as a scapegoat. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that “Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” adding that Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
Let's wind down with this from Senator Adam Schiff's office:
Schiff on Trump abusing power to go after his enemies: “This is a broad societal effort to silence, intimidate the opposition. It’s what dictators do.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that he submitted alongside Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to the Department of Justice seeking records of potential executive branch misconduct or corruption, including on information related to White House Border Czar Tom Homan reportedly accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents as a bribe for government contracts.
Schiff also blasted the Trump administration’s investigation into his colleagues, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, highlighting that Trump is once again abusing the power of his office to go after his critics and to silence and intimidate them.
View the full interview here.
Key excerpts:
On Trump admin refusal to answer questions on Tom Homan investigation, the need to submit FOIA requests for answers:
[…] Here where the Justice Department dismissed the case for reasons it’s never made clear, the question is, did they ever get the money back, or did he just get this $50,000 bribe gift from the FBI? And we should be able to get answers from the Attorney General on that or the Director of the FBI, but that requires that Republicans join us in doing serious oversight. That requires the Judiciary Committee demand, on a bipartisan basis, answers to those very basic questions. They haven’t been willing to do that. So, Senator Whitehouse, Senator Blumenthal myself, have now made these FOIA requests. My experience in the first Trump administration, when they likewise stonewalled oversight is sometimes FOIA is a quicker process to get answers, because you can go to court to enforce them — than even congressional oversight — particularly here where Republicans aren’t willing to do it.
On Trump admin investigation and intimidation tactics into members of Congress for simply reciting the law:
[…] This is plainly intended to try to intimidate them. We have the astonishing situation where the president, the Pentagon are saying that if you state the law, if you state what the Constitution provides, that that’s how somehow going to subject you to investigation, prosecution for sedition, court martialing. It’s absurd, but the whole point of it is also a dangerous effort to try to silence and intimidate. And I can tell you knowing all of these six who made that video, they are not about to be silenced or intimidated. They have faced far greater in their careers than these idle threats from the president or the Pentagon. But nevertheless, it’s part of the abuse of the Justice Department to go after the president’s enemies. He’s now abusing the Pentagon to go after his enemies. He’s abusing the FCC to go after his critics in late night comedy. He’s using the Department of Education to go after his critics at universities. This is a broad societal effort to silence, intimidate the opposition. It’s what dictators do. And I’m just so proud of the patriotism of my colleagues, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, two of our most respected colleagues, I think all of us in the Democratic caucus are feeling enormous sense of pride in them and support for them.
[…] It’s not a serious investigation. There’s no court or court martial in the world that would find fault, I think, with my colleagues restating the obvious restating of the law. But you know, it’s designed to set a chilling effect. It’s designed not only to chill these particular members, but to send a message to other members of Congress, House or Senate, that you got to watch what you say, because you will be investigated. You can be threatened with prosecution. You might have to retain counsel. We will essentially put you through the ringer if you dare stand up to this President. But you know, I can tell you, my colleagues and I feel this only stiffens our resolve to stand prouder, stand stronger, push back harder against this lawless administration.
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