Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that he wasn’t in the room when the U.S. military ordered a second strike that killed the survivors from an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela, which some lawmakers have warned could be a war crime.
During a White House cabinet meeting on Tuesday, a reporter noted that President Donald Trump had previously said that there had not been a second strike on the survivors of the targeted boat.
“You had said that you didn’t know if the second strike on that one boat had happened, but you wouldn’t have wanted it,” the reporter said. “Now that your administration has acknowledged that it happened, do you support that second strike?”
Trump, however, deferred to Hegseth.
“I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete,” the president said. “I wasn’t involved in it. I knew they took out a boat.”
For his part, Hegseth defended “taking a lethal kinetic approach” to dealing with alleged drug traffickers.
“Now, the first couple of strikes, as you would, as any leader would want, you want to own that responsibility,” the defense secretary remarked. “So I said I’m going to be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it’s the right strike.”
“I watched that first strike lot,” he continued. “I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs.”
“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.”
Hegseth claimed that “the American people are safer” because Bradley eliminated the “threat.” It was not immediately clear how the survivors were a threat to Americans after the boat had been destroyed.
“So you didn’t see any survivors to be clear after that first strike?” the reporter pressed.
“I did not personally see survivors, but I stand… because the thing was on fire,” Hegseth replied. “It was exploded and fire or smoke, you can’t see anything, you got digital, this is called the fog of war.”
The secretary appeared to become agitated as he continued: “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.”
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