Top Republicans Turn Against Hegseth, Demand Video of Boat Strike
Republican leadership is tiring of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Top conservatives have started to publicly voice their discontent with Trump’s appointed war chief, as reports circulate about a Pentagon decision to mercilessly kill survivors of a drone strike in the Caribbean on September 2.
Republicans have been practically mute as Hegseth’s careless, monthslong killing spree has claimed the lives of at least 83 people. But GOP-led panels in the House and Senate are dialing up their scrutiny of the Pentagon, demanding a full account of the September boat strikes.
The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees are both demanding audio and video of the incident. “We’re going to conduct oversight, and we’re going to try to get to the facts,” vowed Senator Roger Wicker.
Senator Thom Tillis told CNN that he was still trying to understand whether Hegseth had ordered the second strike that day, killing a couple of survivors that clung to the wreckage left by the initial attack.
“Obviously, if it can be substantiated by facts, it’s a violation of both ethical and possibly legal requirements,” Tillis said. “If it is substantiated, whoever made that order needs to get the hell out of Washington.”
The North Carolina lawmaker was not the only conservative in Washington irate over the events. Senator Lindsey Graham said that he was still working out “the facts” but suggested that the attack could have run afoul of the law.
“It’s a long-held rule that survivors of the ship attack are no longer combatants, and an air crew member in a parachute is no longer a combatant. You’re out of the fight,” Graham told CNN. “I don’t know what the facts are, but that’s general law. We’ll see what the facts are.”
Before he knew that the White House had confirmed the Pentagon struck the boat twice, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice told the network that a second attack seemed “way over the edge.”
“I don’t see how that’s acceptable,” he added.
Ultimately, Hegseth’s long string of scandals appear to be adding up, pushing his potential congressional allies further and further away.
Representative Don Bacon, who serves on the House Committee on Armed Services, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Hegseth should be forced out of government—if he’s deemed responsible for the second strike.
“I felt that way under Signalgate,” Bacon said, referring to an incident in March when Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen. “He should’ve taken responsibility then, and he didn’t.”
“I’ve seen enough that I don’t think he’s the right leader,” Bacon told Raju.
The White House has repeatedly insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia, though U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical—particularly since several of the boats were thousands of miles away in international waters, and since the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction. Pentagon officials reportedly haven’t been concerned with identifying the people on the boats before attacking.
