Secretary of War Pete Hegseth can’t catch a break from the smears and lies.
The swamp keeps hunting for the smoking gun to take him down.
And Pete Hegseth felt like he took a gut punch when one former ally turned on him.
As Swamp Digest reports:
Democrats and the media want to imprison Hegseth for supposed “war crimes” over a September 2 strike on a drug-running boat in the Caribbean.
The Washington Post falsely claimed Hegseth gave a “kill everybody” order that led to the military firing a second round of missiles at a boat that was disabled from the initial volley, and which survivors supposedly clung to for life.
The Navy Admiral who actually ordered the strike said Hegseth gave no such “kill everybody” order and that he ordered the second strike in concert with a legal advisor.
But that didn’t stop House Republicans from teaming with Democrats to target Hegseth.
Republicans slipped a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that withholds 25 percent of Hegseth’s travel allowance until the War Department releases the video of the strike to Congress.
“Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04) allowed a provision to remain in the final FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act that withholds 25 percent of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office travel budget until the Pentagon provides unedited footage of Southern Command strikes, including the controversial September 2 boat takedown, to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees,” RedState reports.
Republicans are enabling this Democrat hoax as turning the video of the strike over to Congress allows Democrats to leak it to the media and generate another week of news cycles over a story that is over and done with.
Hegseth’s legal advisor, Tim Parlatore, explained to RedState that the strike in question was a lawful military operation against a legitimate narcoterrorist target.
“You have a boat full of cocaine and terrorists heading to this country to poison and kill Americans. That’s a legitimate target.” Parlatore stated. “You then do battle damage assessment. The boat and the cargo remain legitimate military targets that SOUTHCOM has been ordered to put on the bottom of the ocean.” Parlatore referred to the death of drug traffickers resulting from the second strike as “collateral damage.”
The media was up in arms over the so-called “double tap” strike.
But Parlatore recounted that the military has commonly used such tactics since World War 2.
“Take the Battle of Midway. One of the Japanese carriers we blew up was burning, dead in the water, no longer able to fight or launch aircraft, and it was full of wounded Japanese sailors. You know what we did? We kept throwing torpedoes into it until it went to the bottom of the ocean. And that was lawful. The goal was to put the ship down so it couldn’t be towed back, repaired, and put back into the fight. The goal was not to kill all the wounded Japanese sailors on board,” Parlatore added.
Establishment RINOs wanted Hegseth out from day one.
The swamp prefers a Secretary of War who will subvert President Trump’s foreign policy, like James Mattis schemed to do by undermining Trump’s transgender troop ban and withdrawal from Syria in the first Trump administration.
That’s why the knives are out for Hegseth.
