Pete Hegseth’s scramble to shield himself from blame for a blatantly illegal strike on a boat in the Caribbean hasn’t exactly been subtle—least of all to his own subordinates.
The 45-year-old embattled Secretary of Defense has aggressively tried to wash his hands of a second deadly U.S. strike on an alleged drug boat on Sept. 2, following a bombshell Washington Post report earlier this week.
Two people survived the initial blast on Sept. 2 and were clinging to the burning vessel when the second strike hit—an incident that, if true, potentially amounts to a war crime. The strike was reportedly carried out under direct orders from Hegseth to “kill everybody.”
Multiple sources within the Department of Defense and the White House told Zeteo on Tuesday that they were “livid” over Hegseth’s scapegoating.
“They could at least try to be less obvious about what they’re doing,” one Defense Department official said.
It’s not hard to see why Hegseth, who now refers to himself as the so-called “Secretary of War,” is scrambling. White House officials told Zeteo that attorneys across several federal agencies have warned that the second strike, if true, would be “incredibly illegal,” citing evidence from the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual.
“I’m not even a military lawyer and I knew this would be illegal,” a Trump administration official said. “I have said as much to several colleagues… there’s defending the homeland, and then there’s criminal behavior.”
Hegseth initially dismissed reports about the second strike as “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting” from “fake news.” But a day later, he pivoted and pinned the order on his subordinate, Admiral Mitch Bradley.
Hegseth told reporters during a Cabinet Meeting on Tuesday that “any leader” should “own responsibility” for their subordinates. Just moments later, he skirted all responsibility, insisting that Bradley ordered the second strike and that he only learned of it hours after the fact.
“I watched that first strike live… but at the Department of War, we have a lot of things to do,” he said. “I didn’t stick around for the hour or two… so I moved on to my next meeting,” he said.
Perhaps he took note from Trump, who threw Hegseth under the bus as quickly as Hegseth threw Bradley.
“As far as the attack is concerned, I didn’t… I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete,” Trump said Tuesday. He said he viewed it as an attack but was unaware of the second strike. “I didn’t know about the second strike… I wasn’t involved. I knew they took out a boat.”
More than 80 people have been killed in a series of U.S. strikes in the Caribbean since early September. The military typically releases grainy video footage to accompany such operations, but has offered little evidence in this case to show the vessels were engaged in drug trafficking.
Democrats have called for the Pentagon to release the footage of the strike. Members of both parties have said there will be an investigation.
The strikes have sparked outrage and grave concern from lawmakers across the aisle. In October, NBC reported that GOP lawmakers had left briefings fuming over the lack of basic information they’d received from the Trump administration about the strikes.
With such sparse information, GOP lawmakers were growing increasingly concerned that an American citizen could have been killed in the attacks, NBC reported.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Pentagon for comment.
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