Trump Admin Lawyers Now Warn Boat Strike May Be Illegal, as Hegseth Passes the Buck
‘If the Washington Post is right, then a crime was committed,’ a Trump admin lawyer tells Zeteo, as Pete Hegseth tries to pass the buck.
In the days after the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration carried out a second strike on a boat in the Caribbean sea – killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage – an array of lawyers in the Trump administration began warning their senior colleagues: If the reporting is correct, this is a massive “problem” and it would be blatantly illegal, sources with knowledge of the situation tell Zeteo.
According to the Post, the two survivors were killed after Donald Trump’s defense secretary and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth gave a verbal order that a source described to the paper as a directive “to kill everybody.” Now, Hegseth is attempting to pass the buck and blame the second Sept. 2 strike, which experts say may be a war crime, on a subordinate.
To this point, Trump’s second term has been marked by proud, swaggering lawlessness, and a general attitude of “What are you gonna do about it?” Indeed, there is no legal basis for Trump’s bombing campaign on boats supposedly carrying drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean – and that hasn’t stopped Trump and Vice President JD Vance from joking and laughing about it. As absurd as it sounds, it is unusual to watch this president and his top officials refuse to take credit for a decision to kill two men “blown apart in the water,” as the Post put it.
Trump and Hegseth’s ongoing effort to pin the double-tap strike on an admiral comes as attorneys working in different federal agencies have stressed to senior personnel that it would be likely incredibly illegal to deliberately commit the kind of “no quarter” strike that Team Trump carried out on Sept. 2, two administration officials tell Zeteo. (Both sources are lawyers by trade.) Some of these Trump administration attorneys have cited the Department of Defense’s own Law of War Manual in their frank analysis.