Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lost his cool during a White House cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Hegseth was taking questions from the press when he fired off a defensive response over the Sept. 2 lethal strikes on a boat in the Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela, where survivors were reportedly targeted following the first attack.
A reporter asked if Hegseth saw any survivors before the second strike.
“I did not personally see survivors, but I stand… because the thing was on fire. It was exploded. Fire and smoke. You can’t see anything, you’ve got digital… This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand,” Hegseth said, appearing agitated by the question.
“You sit in your air-conditioned offices, or up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick, and you plant fake stories in The Washington Post about ‘kill everybody,’ phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made. I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to war fighters,” Hegseth said.
He cited the recent report from The Post about the lethal strikes and sources who indicated what happened behind the scenes.
Hegseth also praised Trump, saying the president has “empowered commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people. We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.”
The Trump administration has claimed the boat strikes were necessary.
“So I said ‘I’m going to be the one to make the call’ after getting all the information and making sure it’s the right strike,” Hegseth said. “That was Sept. 2…. I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve 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 meeting.”
Hegseth argued that Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley had the authority to issue the order.
“He sunk the boat and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back, and the American people are safer because narco terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water and eventually on land if necessary. We will eliminate that threat, and we’re proud to do it,” he said.
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