President Donald Trump said Sunday that he has “great confidence” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not give a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea in September.
Trump said Hegseth told him “he did not say that, and I believe him, 100 percent.”
During an attack on a boat on Sept. 2 — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — a live drone feed showed two survivors from an original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat after an initial missile attack, The Post reported Friday afternoon.
In order to comply with a spoken order from Hegseth to kill everyone, the Special Operations commander overseeing the mission ordered a second strike that killed the two survivors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Trump said he would look into the issue. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine,” the president told reporters.
After the publication of The Post’s report, Hegseth wrote on X that “these highly effective strikes are designed to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes,’” adding: “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.” He claimed that the military operations in the Caribbean are “lawful” and denounced “the fake news.”
On Sunday, the president also said he has “very little” concern over the way the U.S. is handling the boat strikes in the Caribbean. The U.S. military, he said, is doing an “amazing job.”
“Just look at the numbers. The amount of drugs coming into our country by sea is infinitesimal compared to what it was just a few months ago,” Trump said aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington from Palm Beach, Florida, where he spent the Thanksgiving long weekend at his Mar-a-Lago Club.
Trump has sought to tie the strikes to the spread of fentanyl, but nearly all of the narcotics being targeted in the attacks have been cocaine, The Post has reported, much of it headed away from America’s shores.
The Trump administration has justified the attacks and its ongoing campaign in the Caribbean — which has killed more than 80 people — by arguing that the U.S. “is in a non-international armed conflict” with drug traffickers. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said in a classified memo that U.S. military personnel who are engaged in lethal action in Latin America would not be exposed to future prosecution.
The news report has spurred lawmakerson both sides of the aisle in Congress to demand reviews of the September strikes.
Republican-led committees in the Senate and the House said they will amplify their scrutiny of the Pentagon. Bipartisan members of both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee say that they will gather a full accounting of the operation.
On Sunday, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) said that, if the reporting is true, “it’s a clear violation of the DOD’s own laws of war, as well as international laws about the way you treat people who are in that circumstance.”
“And so this rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” Kaine said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) told “Face the Nation”: “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.” Turner added that the White House has not provided Congress information supporting the Post’s report.
In October, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and top committee Democrat Jack Reed (Rhode Island) made public two letters they had previously sent to the Pentagon, requesting the orders, recordings and legal rationale related to the strikes.
In a rare warning, the senators wrote that the Defense Department had surpassed the time required by law to provide some of the materials, which would shed light on Hegseth’s initial order in September.
Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s campaign is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to prosecution because the alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not in an “armed conflict” with the U.S.
On Saturday, a group of former military lawyers and senior leaders known as the Former JAGs Working Group, which has scrutinized the Trump administration’s military activities in Latin America, said in a statement that the targeting of defenseless people is prohibited — regardless of whether the U.S. is in an armed conflict, conducting law enforcement or other military operations.
Under the circumstances cited by The Post, “not only does international law prohibit targeting these survivors, but it also requires the attacking force to protect, rescue, and, if applicable, treat them as prisoners of war,” the group said in a statement circulated to news media. “Violations of these obligations are war crimes, murder, or both. There are no other options.”
Ellen Nakashima, Aaron Schaffer and Victoria Bisset contributed to this report.
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