Pete Hegseth’s Own AI Bot Backfires on His Boat Strikes

Et tu, ChatGPT?

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his department’s new AI chatbot for military personnel, GenAI.mil. Almost immediately, the bot called a “hypothetical” situation where the government orders a strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat and then double-taps said boat to kill the survivors, “unambiguously illegal.”

A military source who spoke to Straight Arrow News Wednesday pointed reporters to a Reddit thread that featured the alleged interaction with the bot. The source said that military personnel wasted no time in testing the bot’s capabilities.

Hegseth has spent recent weeks ardently defending the legality of a situation just like the one described to the chatbot. Backed by President Donald Trump, Hegseth has ordered at least 22 (likely illegal) airstrikes against numerous boats in international waters under the guise of stopping “narcoterrorism,” which have so far killed at least 87 people. After the very first strike on September 2, he ordered a double-tap attack on an already bombed boat in order to kill two survivors.

The outright killing of shipwrecked survivors has sparked bipartisan outrage, though many Republicans claim to still need more information before they abandon Hegseth. Trump is distancing himself from the situation, saying he’s “not involved.”

At least someone—or something?—in the Trump administration has moral clarity.

The Department of Homeland Security just paid nearly $140 million to be in charge of managing its own deportation flights. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has signed a multimillion-dollar contract to purchase six Boeing 737 aircrafts from Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose owners already have ties to massive DHS contracts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously chartered planes to carry out deportations. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that owning its own planes would allow ICE to “operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” 

Now the agency would be responsible for managing its own fleet of aircraft, flight crews, and all the logistics involved in transporting immigrant detainees around and out of the country. But John Sandweg, former acting ICE director, said that dealing with all of this might be more trouble than it’s worth.  

“It’s so much easier to issue a contract to a company that already manages a fleet of airplanes,” Sandweg told the Post. “So this move I’m surprised by because what the administration wants to accomplish, by and large, can be accomplished through charter flights already.”

$140 million is just a small drop in the $170 billion bucket that is DHS’s new four-year budget—but it’s not clear that the decision to run its own deportation airline won’t incur more costs as part of the Trump’s administration’s ongoing efforts to drive up the rate of removals.

The owners of Daedalus Aviation, William Allen Walters III and Taundria Cappel, are also the figures behind Salus Worldwide Solutions Corporation, which won a three-year $915 million air services contract to carry out deportations. That contract is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, over allegations that it was an “unlawful, rushed, and non-competitive award.”

Now that the 2025 elections are over, we can definitively say: This was a very good year for Democrats.

According to an analysis by Daniel Nichanian for Bolts, Democrats flipped 21 percent of Republican-held state legislative seats—a huge upset and a harbinger of midterm doom for the president’s party.

On the Republican side, candidates managed to flip exactly zero seats: not in New Jersey, where Bolts reports the party had high hopes, and not in newly red Trump-voting districts in New York.

For those hoping for a 2026 blue wave like the one we saw in 2018, get excited: So far, 2025’s election results are looking eerily similar to 2017’s. During the first year of Donald Trump’s first term, Democrats won big in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as in special elections across the country—the same thing that happened this year, with New Jersey Democrats gaining five seats in their assembly, and Virginia Democrats gaining a whopping 13.

And according to Bolts, the overall swing this year is even stronger: 21 percent of GOP-held seats flipped, compared to 2017’s 20 percent.

What’s more, Bolts’ analysis looks at legislative seats, so these winning statistics don’t even take into consideration big victories on the state executive level, such as Governors-elect Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherill in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, or local offices, like just-elected future Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins.

In an even stronger referendum than in 2017, voters made clear that they’re tired of Trump.

The feds worked for a year to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling millions of dollars of U.S. aviation equipment into Russia for its war on Ukraine. But now that she’s finally in the United States, where she can face charges, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport her. 

The case against the woman, Yana Leonova, could fall apart if she were to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. She’s facing a 10-count felony indictment for alleged fraud, smuggling, and money laundering. Or, if ICE has its way, she could just, you know, go home. 

Judge Zia M. Faruqui called the situation “Kafkaesque” in a hearing Monday, according to the Post. In a written order, he said, “Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally.’… The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”

Technically, Leonova was only authorized to remain in the country for two weeks after she arrived in early November. So ICE pounced: DHS told the court that they planned to take Leonova into custody and deport her—if and when she was released from D.C. jail, where she’s been held since she arrived. 

The move has confounded lawyers and judges alike. Now prosecutors must ask DHS if Leonova can be given legal authorization to stay in the country while she is tried for her alleged weapons smuggling. 

“I haven’t been in this predicament before, your honor,” one prosecutor said to the judge at Monday’s hearing.

“Me, either,” Faruqui responded, according to the Post.

It seems when it comes to locking up actual criminals, as opposed to daycare workers, pregnant citizens, or children, Donald Trump couldn’t care less.  

The U.S. government is threatening new sanctions on the International Criminal Court unless it changes its founding document to guarantee that it won’t prosecute President Trump or other administration officials. 

Reuters, citing an unnamed White House official, reports that if the court doesn’t listen to American demands, including dropping investigations into war crimes by Israel in Gaza and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Trump administration could sanction more ICC officials, as well as the entire court. 

Republicans and Democrats alike have long attacked the court over its investigation into Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and those efforts only increased after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif last year. 

In March 2020, ICC prosecutors opened an investigation in Afghanistan that included possible crimes by the U.S. military. In 2021, the court deprioritized, but never closed, the investigation, and apparently the Trump administration is worried. 

“There is growing concern ... that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” the unnamed White House official told Reuters. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

Even under the Biden administration, the U.S. was hostile to the ICC, with Biden calling the arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu “outrageous,” even though Israel has killed at least 69,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023.  But so far, the ICC has resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S., rejecting American demands last week. 

The U.S. has already imposed sanctions against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as several of its judges, and, along with Israel, has challenged the court’s jurisdiction on non-member states. 

The U.S. is not a signatory or party to the Rome Statute that created the court in 2002, although many of its allies around the world are. Changing the document would require a two-thirds vote from all of the 125 countries that ratified the Rome Statue, which gives the ICC a mandate to prosecute individuals, including sitting heads of state, for crimes committed by them or under their command on the territory of a member state. Trump doesn’t want to be one of them.