One of Pete Hegseth’s former colleagues at Fox News says it gives him “no pleasure to say” that the defense secretary must be prosecuted for war crimes.
Andrew Napolitano, now a senior judicial analyst on the pro-Trump network Newsmax, dismissed the White House’s claim that the U.S. military acted within the law when Hegseth allegedly ordered that everyone aboard a suspected Venezuelan drug boat be killed in the Caribbean in September, including two people who survived the initial airstrike.
“I wish the White House would reveal to us the laws on which the president is relying. He says he has an opinion from the Justice Department, but neither the Justice Department nor the White House will offer it for public scrutiny,” Napolitano, 75, a retired judge who was ousted from Fox News in 2021 over sexual misconduct claims, told Newsmax host Shaun Kraisman.
“And it gives me no pleasure to say what I’m about to say, because I worked with Peter Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News, but this is an act of a war crime. Ordering survivors, who the law requires be rescued, instead to be murdered. There’s absolutely no legal basis for it,” Napolitano said.
Hegseth began appearing on Fox News as a contributor in 2014 and served as Fox & Friend Weekend host until November 2024, when he was nominated for secretary of defense.
Napolitano added, “Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger, should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”
Hegseth, 45, is facing intensifying scrutiny after The Washington Post reported that he gave an order to “kill everybody” in September, including two survivors who were seen clinging to a destroyed boat targeted by the Trump administration during its campaign against so-called “narco terrorists.”
Navy Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing operations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is said to have issued the actual order to fire again, but only under Hegseth’s authority.
Questions have now been raised about what exactly was said before the second airstrike was launched and how directly involved Hegseth was. The day after the strikes, which killed a total of 11 people, Hegseth told Fox News he had “watched it live.”
During Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting alongside President Donald Trump, Hegseth again said he watched the initial airstrike as it happened on video but claimed he did not “personally see survivors” desperately holding on to the burning wreckage. He added that he didn’t “stick around” for the second strike and had already “moved on to my next meeting.”
Hegseth and the Trump administration have tried to shift blame to Bradley and argue that he ordered a second strike to eliminate the threat posed by the suspected drug boat entirely.
Elsewhere in his Newsmax appearance, Napolitano dismissed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s assertion that the second strike was justified as self-defense against alleged “narco terrorists.”
“The law of armed conflict says survivors have to be rescued. They can’t be killed. That’s very clear. It’s in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it’s in federal law,” Napolitano said. “So we’ll see where this goes. I think that both houses of Congress are going to investigate it.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Pentagon for comment.
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