President Donald Trump rejected the claim that War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike to kill survivors in a Caribbean drug-boat strike.
"I don't know that happened, and Pete said he did not even know what people were talking about," Trump told reporters Sunday night aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington, D.C., after spending the Thanksgiving holiday at Florida’s Mar-a-Lago.
"I wouldn't have wanted a second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine."
The comments — first flagged in a post on X with White House media-scrum audio — underscored Trump's defense of the War Department’s Operation Southern Spear strikes on drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean.
Congressional leaders from both parties have called for oversight, saying follow-up strikes on incapacitated individuals could amount to war crimes if survivors posed no threat.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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