‘He Said He Didn’t Do it’: Trump Confronted Over Report Pete Hegseth Ordered Killings Of Suspected Drug Boat Crew

AP Photo/Nick Wass

President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he believed Pete Hegseth was telling the truth when he denied telling Seal Team 6 to strike at an alleged drug boat for a second time to kill any survivors.

According to a recent report in The Washington Post, the Secretary of Defense reportedly ordered SEAL Team 6 to “kill everybody” aboard a suspected drug-trafficking boat that was spotted by a drone in the Caribbean a few months ago.

Unnamed sources told the newspaper that a second strike was made on the vessel after two survivors were seen clinging to the wreckage. Such a move could be considered a war crime under the military code.

The mission in question happened in September, when the Trump administration claimed they had targeted a drug-running boat out of Venezuela. Some 20 attacks have followed the initial incident.

Trump spoke to reporters on Air Force One, Monday in a Q&A session that was recorded in audio.

After a reporter asked, “Can you talk to us a little bit about the strikes and controversy around Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth?” the president responded:

TRUMP: I don’t know anything about it. He said he did not say that, and I believe him 100%.

REPORTER: You don’t know if there was a second strike to kill the two men after the first strike?

TRUMP: He said he didn’t do it.

REPORTER: Would you be okay with that if he did?

TRUMP: He said he didn’t do it, so I don’t have to make that decision.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired Navy Captain, said on CNN, Sunday that if the allegations of a double-strike were true, he had “serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over.”

“Going after survivors in the water, that is clearly not lawful,” the senator added.

In an article for National Review, conservative legal commentator Andy McCarthy wrote, “If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law.”

He continued, “I say ‘at best’ because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug boats — without congressional authorization, under circumstances in which the boat operators pose no military threat to the United States, and given that narcotics trafficking is defined in federal law as a crime rather than as terrorist activity, much less an act of war — are lawless and therefore that the killings are not legitimate under the law or armed conflict.”

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