Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may have further incriminated himself in remarks made during this week’s cabinet meeting, according to a former federal prosecutor.
President Donald Trump’s self-styled “secretary of war” told reporters Tuesday that he watched the initial strike Sept. 2 on an alleged drug smuggling boat but did not “stick around” for a second strike he reportedly authorized against two survivors, and former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance wrote on her “Civil Discourse” Substack that his comments could end up haunting him.
“Hegseth might want to consider, in the words of MAGA, lawyering up,” Vance wrote.
The defense secretary claimed that he “did not personally see survivors” because the boat was on fire after the strike he witnessed via drone footage, chalking it up to “the fog of war,” but Vance said Hegseth’s bluster against reporters would not shield him from accountability as the investigation moved further.
“The military has a strong tradition of truth-telling in the most difficult circumstances,” she wrote. “So information about who issued the order, why no one stopped it from being carried out despite the clear guidance in the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual, and so forth, is all coming out. It’s only a matter of time.”
Military sources came forward to disclose Hegseth’s verbal directive, which was carried out by Adm. Frank Bradley, and Vance said that shows that more evidence likely exists tying the secretary to the second strike.
“It’s clear that there are already people inside of the Department, the military, or both who want to make sure the story becomes public, or we wouldn’t know about it,” Vance wrote. “Among the compelling reasons for congressional investigation is that military records of the strike, the documentary evidence of what in fact happened and who was involved, can be collected and an accurate picture of the events and who is responsible will emerge. Trump’s first impeachment happened because of the effort to hide the record of his not-so-perfect call with Ukraine’s president and the response of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who put his own career in jeopardy to tell the truth.”
The president told reporters at the meeting, before he dozed off several times, that he hadn’t been consulted in advance of the strikes, and he claimed he still hasn’t been fully briefed about them, and Vance said his denials reminded her of the early days of the “Russiagate” investigation that consumed his first term.
“That’s simply not credible,” she wrote. “The echoes of first-term Trump distancing himself from people like George Papadopoulos, the aide Trump dismissed as a mere coffee boy, despite photographic evidence to the contrary, after he entered a plea deal during the Mueller investigation. ‘I have no idea who that guy is,’ Trump said when that happened. Covfefe.”
“Trump has dodged accountability in the past, but that doesn’t have to always be the case,” Vance concluded. “Revealing the truth is a form of accountability on its own, and consequences can follow. Right now, it’s about Hegseth, the people in his chain of command, and orders that were given. The prospect that Congress might rise to its constitutional role and engage in oversight is refreshing. It’s what we need in this moment. We must do everything in our power to hold their feet to the fire until it’s done.”
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