Hegseth Blames ‘Fog of War’ for Second Strike on Drug Boat Survivors Amid Grilling in Front of Trump

Gabe Gutierrez, the senior White House correspondent for NBC News, pressed President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Monday’s Cabinet meeting on the double-tap strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in early September, which reportedly killed two survivors from the first strike.

Critics are calling the second attack a war crime as a growing scandal rages in Washington, DC over what exactly Hegseth ordered and when.

“Mr. President, thank you so much for taking questions with your assembled cabinet. I wanted to clarify something that you had said on Sunday regarding the boat strikes near Venezuela. You had said that you didn’t know if the second strike on that one boat had happened, but you wouldn’t have wanted it,” Gutierrez began, adding:

Now that your administration has acknowledged that it happened, do you support that second strike? And Mr. Secretary, I wanted to clarify something you had said in an interview back in September, I believe, on Fox News. You said that you had watched that strike live on television. In real time, did you know that there were survivors after the initial strike?

“Well, look, all I know is this: every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000 on average lives—45,000 lives. They’ve been sending enough of this horrible fentanyl and other things like cocaine and other things, but fentanyl right now is the leader of the pack to kill our entire nation, because a little speck on the head of a pin can kill somebody. It’s very dangerous stuff. I know so many people where their sons were drug addicts,” Trump replied, adding:

They had one little sample and they died. They died. They couldn’t believe it. As far as the attack is concerned, I didn’t—you know, I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete. But to me it was an attack. It wasn’t one strike, two strikes, three strikes. Somebody asked me a question about the second strike. I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about people. I wasn’t involved in it. I knew they took out a boat.

But I would say this: they had a strike. I hear the gentleman that was in charge of that is extraordinary. He’s an extraordinary person. I’ll let Pete speak about him. But Pete was satisfied. Pete didn’t know about a second attack having to do with two people, and I guess Pete would have to speak to it. I can say this: I want those boats taken out. And if we have to, we’ll attack on land also, just like we attack on sea.

And there’s very little coming in by sea. I think we’ve knocked out over 90% of it. There’s very little, and I understand that. We’re saving hundreds of thousands of lives with those pinpoint attacks. It’s an amazing thing when you see a boat going along, and you know, a lot of the press would like to say they’re not—you see the boat, they’re not maybe drugs. You see these boats. First of all, who has five engines on the back of a boat going in weird directions and loaded up with lots of white containers? They’re all bags of things. No, they’ve done an amazing job, and Pete’s done an amazing job. Pete, you could probably better answer the question.

“No, you’re spot on, sir. I think you gotta start with the baseline, which Marco laid out. Everybody’s laid out: we’ve got 20 million people invading our country over four years. We don’t know where they’re coming from. That includes Tren de Aragua and cartels and violent criminals. They bring drugs, and you mentioned it, Mr. President: poisoning, an intentional poisoning of the American people, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Hegseth replied, adding:

So the president had the courage to designate these cartels as designated terrorist organizations. Now, a number of us here served in the military and spent 20 years fighting terrorists like Al-Qaeda and ISIS on the other side of the world. How do you treat Al-Qaeda and ISIS? Do you arrest them and pat them on the head and say, “Don’t do that again”? Or do you end the problem directly by taking a lethal kinetic approach?

And that’s the way President Trump has authorized the War Department to look at these cartels. And I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals, our professionals like Mitch Bradley, Admiral Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC and SOCOM and other commanders. The deliberative process, the detail, the rigor, the intel, the legal, the evidence-based way that we’re able to—with sources and methods that we can’t reveal here—make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization.

We know who’s on it, what they’re doing, what they’re carrying. All these white bales are not Christmas gifts from Santa. This is drugs running on four-motor fast boats or submarines that we’ve also struck. No one’s fishing on a submarine. And I have empowered them to make that call. Now, the first couple of strikes, as you would—as any leader would want—you want to own that responsibility. So I said I’m gonna be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it’s the right strike.

That was September 2nd. There’s a lot of intelligence that goes into building that case and understanding that—a lot of people providing information. I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs.

So I moved on to my next meeting. Couple hours later, I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do, and by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back, and the American people are safer because narco-terrorists know you can’t bring drugs through the water and eventually on land, if necessary, to the American people. We will eliminate that threat, and we’re proud to do it.

“So you didn’t see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike? You personally?” Gutierrez pressed.

“I did not personally see survivors, but I stand—because the thing was on fire. It was exploded and fire and smoke. You can’t see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don’t understand,” Hegseth fumed, adding:

You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill, and you nitpick, and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about “kill everybody” phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw up really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.

I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to warfighters. President Trump has empowered commanders to do what is necessary, which is doing difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people. We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.