President Donald Trump on Sunday evening addressed the controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his alleged order for a second strike on a Venezuelan boat to ensure all passengers were dead.
Trump said he didn’t “know anything about it,” but that Hegseth assured him that “he did not say that.”
“Pete said he did not order the death of those men,” Trump said when asked again about a second strike on the boat, and avoided answering whether he would have been okay with a second strike if Hegseth had ordered one.
“He said he didn’t do it, so I don’t have to make that decision,” Trump said, adding when pressed yet again about the legality of the strikes: “I wouldn’t have wanted that – a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine.”
Hegseth has defended the strikes on boats in the Caribbean as “lawful” after The Washington Post reported that he ordered military officials to leave “no survivors” during a September strike on an alleged drug boat.
Hegseth responded to the report and critics of the strikes with a post on X, in which he wrote that current operations are “lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”
This is a breaking news story. Updates will follow.
