Joe Scarborough: Trump Admin Cornered by ‘Fox News Contributors’ Over ‘Alleged War Crime’ – ‘Not Fighting Lefties’

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough noted that the Trump administration is “not fighting” pushback from “lefties” in the fallout over a reported double tap strike on a suspected narco-trafficking vessel, but backlash from “Fox News contributors” and Republicans enraged by “alleged war crime.”

The Washington Post reported Saturday that a September 2 mission targeting a suspected Venezuelan smuggling boat, part of a Trump administration push against cartel drug routes, escalated after a drone spotted two survivors clinging to the wreckage, prompting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to allegedly order “kill everybody” with a second strike – an order Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley then reportedly carried out.

Legal experts have warned the decision may have been “illegal” under international law.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One late Sunday that Hegseth told him he did not say those words and that he believed the Pentagon chief – although added that he would not personally have ordered the second strike.

Still, as scrutiny piled on Hegseth on Monday, he tweeted out “support” of Bradley and his “combat decisions,” appearing to indicate the admiral was responsible.

During Monday’s Morning Joe, Scarborough, however, noted the bipartisan concern around the incident, specifically from “Fox News contributors.”

The host namedropped conservative legal commentator Andy McCarthy’s scathing column flagging the administration story as “inconsistent” as well as Fox News Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume’s quote-tweet of Hegseth’s Bradley post, commenting: “How to point the finger at someone while pretending to support him.”

Scarborough said:

Once again that the administration, like in the Epstein files, finds themselves in a position where they’re not fighting lefties. Right? They’re not going up against the most progressive voices in America, people they can call communists or marxists, it is Fox News contributors. It is Andy McCarthy saying, ‘no, no, no, no, no, this new excuse of pointing, you know, at somebody else. No, this is inconsistent with what you’ve said before’ or Brit Hume saying, ‘this is what pointing the finger at somebody else looks like’, when of course, this all comes down to Pete Hegseth.

The host lambasted Hegseth’s boasting about loosening rules of engagement in speeches and appearance on Fox & Friends aired the day after the strike in question:

We’re going to be showing clips of him bragging time and time again about getting rid of those politically correct rules of engagement: ‘We’re there to kill.’

I think most damningly, and this is just where the stupidity comes in, to have a strike on September 2, go on Fox & Friends September 3 to brag that you were there from beginning to end, and you saw the attacks, beginning to end, the first attack the second, and that it was all on you. It was all on you. “I’m the He-Man that carried out that strike.”

“The celebrational aspect of it,” co-host Mika Brzezinski added.

Scarborough continued: “If you’re Donald Trump, you don’t want anything to do with this war crime that more and more conservatives, more and more Republicans, not lefties, Republicans, are saying it’s deeply disturbing, this alleged war crime. It is frightening.”

Watch above via MS NOW.