Top military brass have blasted Karoline Leavitt over what they say is an effort to scapegoat a special operations commander who followed orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to carry out what may well have amounted to a war crime.
“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls–t,” as one Pentagon official put it to the Washington Post. “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus,” another added.
Hegseth is under intense fire after the newspaper reported Friday he’d verbally authorized an elite military force to “kill everybody” on board an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean Sea.
After an initial strike, executed on Sept. 2, had left two survivors clinging to the remains of the vessel, Admiral Frank Bradley is understood to have ordered a second attack in compliance with Hegseth’s demand.
Legal experts now argue the incident constitutes a violation of both domestic and international law, which prohibit “no quarter” orders if the directives amount to the intentional killing of a target once the person is incapacitated.
Amid mounting public outcry and moves to open a congressional investigation into the killings, Leavitt offered up a scripted response during a press conference Monday, insisting on the legality of the strike while highlighting Bradley’s role over Hegseth’s.
“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narcoterrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war,” she said, reading from a statement.
“With respect to the strikes in question on September 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes,” she went on. “Admiral 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.”
When pressed by a reporter on whether it was Bradley, head of the Special Operations Command, who gave the order for the second strike, Leavitt nodded and said, “And he was well within his authority to do so.”
Speaking with the Post, military officials said the press secretary’s comments effectively served to tarnish Bradley’s record for the sake of preserving Hegseth’s. “Whether he takes the blame or not, his reputation has been marred by this forever, just by that statement,” one person said.
Nor is Leavitt the only one to have tried shifting the blame over the attack since news of it first broke late last week.
Hegseth himself said in a carefully worded post on X on Monday night that Bradley “is an American hero,” and that “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made.”
Those efforts have not gone over well on either side of the aisle, with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy telling CNN the defense secretary is clearly now trying to “pass the buck” over the strikes.
“He sort of sees the freight train that is coming, right, that both Republicans and Democrats are coming to the conclusion that this was an illegal, wildly immoral act,” he said. “And he is shifting the blame. It’s the opposite of ‘The buck stops here.’ And boy, it’s a chilling signal in the chain of command that the secretary of defense does not have your back.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and Department of Defense for comment on this story.
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