Speaking to reporters on Air Force One yesterday, the president defended Hegseth, saying he believed his statement “100%” that he hadn’t ordered the second strike.
“I’m going to find out about it, but Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.”
When asked if he would have wanted a second attempt to kill the survivors, the president said:
We’ll look into it, but no, I wouldn’t have wanted that – not a second strike. The first strike was very lethal.”
The Washington Post reported that Hegseth “gave a spoken directive” to “kill everybody” on board in September. When there were still two men left after the first strike, a Special Operations commander ordered the follow-up to comply with Hegseth’s direction, the newspaper reported.
Hegseth has strongly denied the report, calling it “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory”.
He also said the US’s strikes on boats so far in the Caribbean had been “lawful under both US and international law.”
Good morning and welcome to our US Politics live blog.
We’re straight back in the thick of it after Thanksgiving: lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are demanding answers from the Trump administration after reports Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth ordered a double-tap strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing two people on board who had survived the first blast.
The allegations, first reported in the Washington Post on Friday, have sparked calls from Congress for an immediate investigation.
Hegseth, who calls himself the Secretary for War on X, has called it “fake news” and President Trump says he believes him.
But Congress is alarmed. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers raised concerns on the weekend that if the reports were true, such attacks would be war crimes.
