Top Republicans Turn Against Hegseth, Demand Video of Boat Strike

Republican leadership is tiring of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Top conservatives have started to publicly voice their discontent with Trump’s appointed war chief, as reports circulate about a Pentagon decision to mercilessly kill survivors of a drone strike in the Caribbean on September 2.

Republicans have been practically mute as Hegseth’s careless, monthslong killing spree has claimed the lives of at least 83 people. But GOP-led panels in the House and Senate are dialing up their scrutiny of the Pentagon, demanding a full account of the September boat strikes.

The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees are both demanding audio and video of the incident. “We’re going to conduct oversight, and we’re going to try to get to the facts,” vowed Senator Roger Wicker.

Senator Thom Tillis told CNN that he was still trying to understand whether Hegseth had ordered the second strike that day, killing a couple of survivors that clung to the wreckage left by the initial attack.

“Obviously, if it can be substantiated by facts, it’s a violation of both ethical and possibly legal requirements,” Tillis said. “If it is substantiated, whoever made that order needs to get the hell out of Washington.”

The North Carolina lawmaker was not the only conservative in Washington irate over the events. Senator Lindsey Graham said that he was still working out “the facts” but suggested that the attack could have run afoul of the law.

“It’s a long-held rule that survivors of the ship attack are no longer combatants, and an air crew member in a parachute is no longer a combatant. You’re out of the fight,” Graham told CNN. “I don’t know what the facts are, but that’s general law. We’ll see what the facts are.”

Before he knew that the White House had confirmed the Pentagon struck the boat twice, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice told the network that a second attack seemed “way over the edge.”

“I don’t see how that’s acceptable,” he added.

Ultimately, Hegseth’s long string of scandals appear to be adding up, pushing his potential congressional allies further and further away.

Representative Don Bacon, who serves on the House Committee on Armed Services, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Hegseth should be forced out of government—if he’s deemed responsible for the second strike.

“I felt that way under Signalgate,” Bacon said, referring to an incident in March when Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen. “He should’ve taken responsibility then, and he didn’t.”

“I’ve seen enough that I don’t think he’s the right leader,” Bacon told Raju.

The White House has repeatedly insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia, though U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical—particularly since several of the boats were thousands of miles away in international waters, and since the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction. Pentagon officials reportedly haven’t been concerned with identifying the people on the boats before attacking.

President Donald Trump is all in on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s plan to exploit the shooting of two National Guard members in order to expand one of the Trump administration’s most racist policies: the travel ban.

Multiple U.S. officials told CBS News Tuesday that Trump’s travel ban would be expanded to roughly 30 countries, up from 19. The Department of Homeland Security also released a statement promising that it would announce a slate of new additions to Trump’s travel ban “soon.”

This announcement comes just days after an Afghan refugee was accused of shooting two guardsmen just blocks away from the White House, spurring the Trump administration to pause asylum case decisions for all nationalities and order a full-scale review of green card cases involving immigrants from the 19 countries currently subject to the travel ban.

Not only is it not clear why the alleged actions of one individual would require all citizens of a country to be barred entry to the U.S., but crucially, Afghanistan is already subject to Trump’s travel ban. Trump’s plot to loop in other countries just shows the lengths the administration will go to further his agenda to smear and exclude immigrants.

It seems the idea for this latest blatantly racist backlash originated with Noem, who wrote on X Monday that she’d recommended Trump impose a “full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS,” she wrote. “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

“EVERY DAMN COUNTRY,” wrote the official DHS X account, sharing Noem’s sentiment.

The Trump administration has also halted all visa and immigration processing for Afghan nationals. The alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, served in a paramilitary unit in Afghanistan led by the CIA and trained by U.S. special operations soldiers. He received his asylum and work authorization in April this year. So, despite Noem’s tantrum, it seems that the Trump administration did at one time want these so-called “foreign invaders.”

Trump’s travel ban currently fully bars entry from Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, and partially restricts travel from several other countries, including Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice on the rules of engagement in war. 

In his book The War on Warriors, published last year, Hegseth wrote about an instance where he rejected a military judge advocate general’s guidance on the rules of engagement, telling troops, “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains.”

Hegseth wrote that the judge advocate general “used the example of an identified enemy holding a rocket-propelled grenade” and asked Hegseth’s platoon, “Do you shoot at him?”

The former Fox News host said his fellow soldiers replied, “Hell, yeah, we light him up,” to which  the JAG said, “Wrong answer, men.” 

“You are not authorized to fire at that man, until that RPG becomes a threat. It must be pointed at you with the intent to fire. That makes it a legal and proper engagement,” the officer said, according to Hegseth, who wrote that his platoon mates “sat in silence, stunned.”

Hegseth wrote that he pulled the platoon aside after the briefing and told them, “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed. And I will have your back—just like our commander. We are coming home, the enemy will not.”

The passage, reported on by The Guardian Tuesday, is one of many instances in Hegseth’s book in which he complains about rules and regulations governing warfare in the U.S. military. In another passage, Hegseth gripes, “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think.”

Throughout the book, Hegseth repeatedly praises his own commander, Colonel Michael Steele, whom he calls a “certified badass,” and who was later reprimanded for reportedly ordering soldiers in 2006 in Iraq to “kill all military age males” in a raid.

All of this takes on new meaning with news this week regarding Hegseth’s actions in the Caribbean Sea. On September 2, following a strike on boats suspected of smuggling drugs to the U.S., Hegseth reportedly ordered an immediate follow-up strike to kill two survivors. A Washington Post report found that Hegseth made an order to kill everybody on the boats, which the White House denies, instead placing the blame on Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley. 

Hegseth’s own words from last year on respecting rules of engagement, as well as international treaties and agreements on war, would seem to suggest that he’d have no problem issuing such an order, which would be a war crime. It would also violate the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, which prohibits declaring “no quarter” or conducting operations “on the basis that there shall be no survivors.” Does Hegseth disagree with that as well? 

It seems that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration have decided to throw admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley to the wolves, pinning the order for a second strike on survivors of a boat bombing—which may constitute a war crime—directly on him.

“Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote on X Monday evening, making sure to spell out that it was Bradley who made the decisions. “America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this @DeptofWar says we have the back of our warriors—we mean it.”

Hegseth’s cryptic message is the latest installment of the fallout from a September 2 boat bombing that killed nine people. There were two survivors left, and The Washington Post reported that they were bombed after Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody.” Hegseth and the White House have not denied that the potentially criminal order was given but on Monday began to claim that the order came from Bradley, who was the mission’s commander under Hegseth.

Hegseth’s message reads more like him leading Bradley to the gallows than it does a message of support, and the public noticed.

“Let’s be absolutely clear: I stand behind Admiral Bradley, who made this decision and not me,” one user replied to Hegseth, mockingly. “It was the right decision, it was legal, I agree with it 100 times out of 100 and I cannot emphasize enough I had nothing to do with the decision Bradley made on his own, which I support.”

“Hegseth off-loading responsibility while framing it like he’s a Tough Military Dude ‘backing warriors’ or whatever is peak Hegseth: cowardly, scummy, insecure, smarmy, selfish, and soaked in deeply affected rhetoric lifted from 80s action movies,” wrote another. “A total worm.”

Republican House and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairs Mike Rogers and Roger Wicker—along with congressional Democrats—are currently moving to have Bradley in for a classified briefing to hear his side of the story.

FBI Director Kash Patel was already trying to make jokes Monday about a humiliating report that he wouldn’t get off a plane to investigate the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk because he didn’t have the right outfit.

Patel has once again become the object of ridicule following a leaked report that he refused to deboard a plane until someone got him a medium-size FBI raid jacket. He ended up taking a female agent’s jacket but then began to complain that that jacket didn’t have the proper patches on it. He refused to disembark until SWAT team members lent him their patches.

Patel tried Monday to clap back at a dig from California Representative Eric Swalwell.

“I don’t mind that FBI Director Kash Patel had to wear a women’s (size medium) jacket to cosplay as someone in charge. I just wish he’d focus on stopping the rampant domestic terrorism happening on his watch,” Swalwell wrote on X.

Patel replied: “I was looking for a Youth Large.... Domestic terrorism arrests are UP 30% this year—impressive, considering I spent zero days dating a Chinese spy named Fang Fang, where should I send your women’s medium for date night?”

It’s unclear how a Youth Large is more “alpha male” than a women’s medium, but OK.

Patel’s rather juvenile reply referred to a 2020 report that Swalwell was among a group of prominent Bay Area Democrats who had been targeted by a suspected Chinese spy named Christine Fang. Swalwell reportedly cut all ties with Fang in 2015 after U.S. intelligence officials alerted him to her alleged connection to China’s Ministry of State Security. Conservatives still make racist jokes about their supposed relationship.

The leaked internal report that contained details about Patel’s temper tantrum also offered a damning assessment of his leadership at the FBI. Two separate sources described Patel as “in over his head.” Another source said that Patel was “not very good” and “may be insecure.”