I don't believe him, he is a compulsive liar just like c-i-c-bone spurs, and he is low class trash too. It will be so great if he is forced to resign and is tried for war crimes. He has a history of condemning rules of war and seems to prefer gang style warfare. Typical of tuff guy reality cowards now that he is being accused of criminal behaviour he has thrown one of his subordinates, an admiral who is as disgusting as hegseth and so deserves no respect, under the proverbial bus, accusing him of ordering the second missile strike. KEEP IN MIND NOT MY pres drumpf / trump claims his illegal attacks on boats from Venezuela are to stop drugs, especially cocaine, from reaching the U.S. His pardoning of convicted cocaine trafficker and former pres of Honduras juan orlando hernandez exposes another drumpf / trump lie, his goal is to remove Venezuelan Pres nicolas maduro from power, more immoral and illegal action by our fascist hitler wannabe. From the New York Times.....
Hegseth Ordered a Lethal Attack but Not the Killing of Survivors, Officials Say
Charlie SavageJulian E. BarnesEric Schmitt and John Ismay
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration on Monday defended the legality of a Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean Sea as calls grew in Congress to examine whether a follow-up missile strike that killed survivors amounted to a crime.
The lethal attack was the first in President Trump’s legally disputed campaign of killing people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they were combatants in a war. It has started coming under intense bipartisan scrutiny in recent days amid questions about the decision to kill the initial survivors and what orders were issued by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.”
She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.
But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.
The officials clarified the sequence of events amid the political and legal uproar that has followed a report in The Washington Post last week. It said that Admiral Bradley ordered the second strike to fulfill a directive by Mr. Hegseth to kill everyone. The reaction has included questions about whether Mr. Hegseth specifically ordered an execution of shipwrecked sailors in violation of the laws of war.
WAR PIG fascist fotze trunt mitch bradley US Navy Admiral
Speaking to reporters on Sunday night, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Hegseth had denied ordering a second strike to kill two people who were wounded but still alive after the first one, saying, “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.”
Mr. Trump also sought to distance himself from the follow-up strike, saying he “wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike,” although he said the first one was “fine.” He defended his broader policy of having the military use lethal force against people suspected of smuggling drugs. Starting with the Sept. 2 attack, his administration has said it has carried out 21 such strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people.
Mr. Hegseth called The Post’s reporting “fabricated” and “inflammatory.” “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes,’” he wrote on social media.
In another social media statement, on Monday, Mr. Hegseth said he stood by Admiral Bradley and what he called the admiral’s “combat decisions” in the strike. “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support,” he wrote. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.”
Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Monday that he had spoken with Mr. Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the strikes and that his committee would conduct a congressional investigation into the matter.
The defense secretary also spoke with Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, according to a U.S. official.
In interviews on Monday, two U.S. officials — both of whom were supportive of the administration’s boat strikes — described a meeting before the attack at which Mr. Hegseth had briefed Special Operations Forces commanders on his execute order to engage the boat with lethal force.
That written order, they said, did not address what should happen if people survived the first strike.
Several people familiar with the congressional effort said that lawmakers had asked to see a copy of the execute order and that the administration refused to turn it over.
The two officials also said Mr. Hegseth made no oral directive at the meeting that went beyond the written order. The Post article did not provide context on when Mr. Hegseth gave what its sources described as a spoken order to kill everyone.
The two officials questioned whether the surviving people were Admiral Bradley’s intended target in the second strike, as opposed to the purported drugs and the disabled vessel. They argued that the purported cargo remained a threat and a lawful military target because another cartel-associated boat might have come to retrieve it.
The Navy warship U.S.S. Sampson docks at the Amador International Cruise Terminal in Panama City in September. Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
One of the officials said the U.S. military intercepted radio communications from one of the survivors to what the official said were narco-traffickers. If so, members of Congress could request those communications as part of its oversight investigation.
The suggestion that Mr. Hegseth, Admiral Bradley or both targeted shipwrecked survivors has been galvanizing because that would apparently be a war crime even if one accepts the Trump administration’s disputed argument for why its boat attacks have been lawful.
Generally, a military cannot deliberately attack civilians, even suspected criminals, who do not pose an imminent threat. The administration has argued the strikes are nevertheless lawful because Mr. Trump has “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels, even though Congress has not declared any such war.
Mr. Trump has also “determined” that the crews of the boats are “combatants.” A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s determinations, according to people who have read it, adding it concluded that suspected shipments of drugs are lawful military targets to prevent cartels from using them to finance their war efforts.
A broad range of legal experts reject that analysis. But even if this were an armed conflict, it is a war crime to kill enemies who are out of the fight. That category includes enemy fighters who have surrendered or are otherwise defenseless and pose no threat.
“Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations,” the Pentagon’s law of war manual says, adding: “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
It also says that it is “prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter,” which means refusing to spare the life of an enemy who has surrendered or is unable to fight.
Geoffrey Corn, who was the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said he believed the entire attack was illegal, because he rejects the administration’s argument that the situation can be legitimately treated as an armed conflict.
But even if it were one, he said, an order specifically to finish off shipwrecked survivors — whether or not Admiral Bradley believed he was carrying out Mr. Hegseth’s instructions — would be unambiguously criminal.
Still, he said, if Admiral Bradley’s order was instead to finish destroying the vessel, even if people were clinging to it, that would be more complicated.
In a real naval armed conflict, he said, it is lawful to fire on a partly disabled enemy warship that is continuing to maneuver or fire its guns, even if there are wounded sailors aboard or shipwrecked sailors clinging to it. But if a warship signals it is out of the fight by ceasing firing and lowering its colors, he said, then it becomes illegal to keep firing upon it.
The problem with all that, he said, is that the speedboat was not a warship with guns to stop firing and colors to lower.
“This is the consequence of treating something that is not really an armed conflict as an armed conflict,” he said. The speedboat could not signal it was out of the fight because “it was not really fighting to begin with.”
Professor Corn, who now teaches military law at Texas Tech University, said that as lawmakers seek answers, they could look into whether the missile used in the second strike was configured as an anti-personnel device — one that is designed to produce lots of shrapnel — or was instead configured to cause maximal damage to a large object.
Robert Jimison contributed reporting.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 2, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Officials Deny Hegseth Order Of Boat Deaths.
Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando HernĆ”ndez, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. HernĆ”ndez. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from JoaquĆn GuzmĆ”n, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. HernĆ”ndez “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. HernĆ”ndez would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. HernĆ”ndez was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, where Mr. HernĆ”ndez was tried, declined to comment. A Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who worked on the investigation into Mr. HernĆ”ndez and spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, called the pardon “lunacy.”
Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
The president has also put intense pressure on NicolĆ”s Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, deploying troops and warships to the region. Mr. Trump has accused him of being the boss of a drug organization called Cartel de los Soles, though specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues say it is not a literal organization. Mr. Trump has also authorized covert C.I.A. action in Venezuela. The end goal, American officials say privately, is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.
The pardon announcement came in a social media post on Friday evening by Mr. Trump. “CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON,” he wrote, minutes after he returned to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he is spending the holiday weekend and took time out to visit his nearby golf club. “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”
Mr. HernĆ”ndez’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, said that he had not known about the pardon until his client’s wife called him on Friday afternoon, in tears, and read Mr. Trump’s social media message. Mr. HernĆ”ndez was supposed to have his appeal heard the week of Dec. 8.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has also weighed in on Honduras’s upcoming election, set for Sunday. He has endorsed a candidate, a former mayor named Nasry “Tito” Asfura from the conservative National Party, the same one that Mr. HernĆ”ndez belongs to. Mr. Asfura had spent much of a highly contested race courting leaders in Washington, including members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle.
This week, Mr. Trump wrote: “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras.” Mr. Asfura did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. HernĆ”ndez, a major figure in Honduras’s National Party, served as president from 2014 to 2022. When he won, he was seen as a willing, albeit flawed, ally by the United States. But his first term was plagued by corruption scandals that led to widespread protests.
His tenure was also defined by the contentious election of 2017, when he secured a second term despite a constitutional ban on re-election. Widespread accusations of fraud set off demonstrations and post-electoral violence involving the military, and nearly two dozen people were killed.
During his second term, Mr. HernĆ”ndez’s rumored connections to drug traffickers escalated after his brother, a former lawmaker, was arrested on drug-trafficking charges in 2018 while visiting the United States. A lead investigator in that case was Emil Bove, then a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and later one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.
Less than a month after leaving office, in 2022, Mr. HernƔndez was arrested and later extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking and weapons charges. During the trial, prosecutors asserted that Mr. HernƔndez had received millions in bribes from drug traffickers, including $1 million from Mr. GuzmƔn, the former Sinaloa cartel leader who is imprisoned in the United States.
Mr. HernĆ”ndez denied that he had trafficked narcotics, offered police protection to drug cartels or taken bribes. But in the end, he was convicted in March 2024 of the drug charges and of possessing and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time, “As president of Honduras, Juan Orlando HernĆ”ndez abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences.”
Since Mr. Trump took office this year, Mr. HernĆ”ndez’s family has attempted to portray his conviction as political persecution by the Biden administration. But the investigation into his ties with drug traffickers took place primarily during Mr. Trump’s first term.
His cause was taken up by figures like Roger Stone, the conservative political operative and Trump ally. Mr. Stone claimed that Mr. HernĆ”ndez had been “trapped” and was a victim of a conspiracy tied to the U.S. government.
Honduras is now governed by a left-wing party, Libre, which was formed by another former president, Manuel Zelaya, after he was ousted in a coup in 2009. His wife, Xiomara Castro, is the current president. The Zelaya-Castro family has itself faced allegations of drug-trafficking ties and was painted by the opposition in this year’s election as pro-Venezuela. Mr. Trump, in one of his recent posts, called the family “the Communists.”
As word spread on Friday about Mr. HernĆ”ndez’s pardon, Todd Robinson, who served as the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs at the State Department, said online: “We blow up ‘alleged’ drug boats in the Caribbean but pardon actually convicted drug traffickers in the U.S. Someone help me make sense of this.”
Mr. Zelaya, the progressive former Honduran president, wrote on social media, “@POTUS, by absolving JOH, protects the looter of the state and now orders people to vote for Asfura: the direct heir of the narco-regime.”
On Friday, Mr. Asfura posted an image of himself, Mr. Trump and Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, on social media.
Opponents of Mr. Asfura in the upcoming election denounced the pardon, with Libre’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, linking it to the string-pulling of Honduran “elites” in Washington. Another top candidate, Salvador Nasralla, proclaimed in a post that, unlike his rivals, he had “clean hands.”
Many in Honduras wondered how Mr. Trump’s pardon would affect the elections this weekend.
“It will, obviously, stir up the same powerful negative sentiment seen in the 2021 elections that pushed Juan Orlando out of power,” said Leonardo Pineda, a Honduran analyst.
He added that, by linking Mr. Asfura to Mr. HernĆ”ndez, Mr. Trump could actually hurt Mr. Asfura’s chances of winning.
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
Annie Correal is a Times reporter covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 30, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump to Free Leader Who Let Drugs Go to U.S..
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