The Trump administration's self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has spent most of the week on defense, facing accusations that he committed war crimes and that he endangered the lives of US pilots at the Pentagon.

It seems to be all turmoil all the time.

Next this is Washington Week with the Atlantic.

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Thank you Once again from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, editor in chief of The Atlantic and Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

On Thursday, the acting inspector General of the Department of Defense released his report on Signalgate in which top national security leaders discussed secret military information on a commercial messaging app with, not to put too fine a point on it here, me.

The Inspector general found that Defense Secretary Hegseth's behavior endangered the safety of American pilots and that he should not have been using a commercial messaging app or his own phone to share secret information about upcoming airstrikes.

In response, Hegseth and his spokesman Sean Parnell denied that the report said what it said.

This is what Parnell wrote.

The Inspector General review is a total exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along.

No classified information was shared.

This matter is resolved and the case is closed.

Hecket himself tweeted, total exoneration, case closed.

Here is what the Inspector general actually wrote.

The secretary's transmission of non-public operational information over signal to an unclear journalist, that would be me, and others 2 to 4 hours before planned strikes, using his personal cell phone exposed sensitive DOD information.

The secretary's actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed US mission objectives and potential harm to US pilots.

Hecketh Parnell and other administration officials are claiming that these findings represent a total exoneration.

Let me be blunt here These people think we are idiots.

I try not to express my personal views from this chair, but since Signalgate happened on my phone, let me say that the most disturbing aspect of this whole episode is that if any other official at the Department of Defense and certainly any uniformed military officer shared information 1100 as sensitive as Heeth and others shared on an insecure messaging app without even knowing that the editor in chief of The Atlantic was on the chat.

They would be fired or court-martialed for their incompetence.

And that's what I have to say about that.

To find out what others have to say about this and about the growing controversy regarding HSA's use of the military to fight alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

Let me bring in three experts.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Nancy Yousef is a national security correspondent at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for, for joining us.

So it's been a terrible week for Pete Hagseth.

That's objective reality suggests that we know that Secretary of Defense is a hard job, but Peter, a lot of these wounds seem self-inflicted.

Self-inflicted, and we're debating whether the Secretary of Defense is following the rules of law in terms of blowing up boats in the Caribbean and following the rules of security on his own phone in terms of military operations.

These are two things you don't want to hear about Secretary of Defense, particularly Secretary of Defense dealing with matters of life and death, you know, dozens of people have been killed in these operations in the Caribbean.

The s tri ke s that were at issue on the call that you happened on the single chat that you happen to be added to involved dozens of people presumably who were killed in the Houthi bases that they were striking at and many a military operations who could have been endangered had the enemy known what you knew and what, uh, you know, shouldn't have been known to anybody outside of the chain of command.

And to say it wasn't classified, is is sort of not the point.

The fact that he decided I'd declassified it.

Well, why would you declassify information like that.

That makes no sense, right?

This information is not post facto.

OK, it's time now to release that.

This is information real time that could affect an operation, you know, the interesting thing about that is that he has original declassification authority as the Secretary of Defense, but he didn't declassify it.

He just used it theos, it's like, it's like the ESP defense.

It's like, you know, that he might have imagined in his head that it was declassified.

Like, I don't think that's how it works when you actually are de cla s s ify ing something.

So even the fiction of this defense, which is it was declassified by virtue of the fact that I shared it is not I use the ESP defense all the time at home, but not like I thought about but not when I'm attacking the Houthis.

Yeah, but Nancy, let's let's let's talk about this in, in, in uh detail, the, the IG report, the Inspector general report.

How do you interpret the findings?

that the IG concluded that while he had the authority, he didn't he, they didn't want to answer directly the question that whether he was classified proper or not.

What they didn't set is spelled out all the ways you're supposed to declassify something and noted that he didn't carry those out.

And so their conclusion was essentially that he put US service members in potential harm's way by sharing information this way.

And what they outlined without sort of saying it directly, even in the unclassified version, is that he picked up words verbatim from the US Central Command commander in the run up to this, the first major military campaign under the Trump administration and typed them verbatim into a. It was almost like a copy paste.

That's right, from a secure communication and let's be clear what he was typing in times, strike targets, platforms that were going to be used.

And to me, the most interesting thing in uh in all this is, well, the secretary claims that not only was it not um classified, but that he was providing nonessential information like the details of an operation.

He was continuing to communicate with US Central Command, according to the report on secure comm.

So he's typing it in the signal and calling it unclassified while talking to the commander in a secure system at the very same time.

Try a counterfactual here, Jeff.

Have you published that information at the time you received it on your phone, they would have come after you.

right?

Right.

And they also would have canceled the strike.

They would have said this is dangerous.

This is putting our troops in danger, we should a counterfactual to be clear that I would never obviously engage it, but this is the way you can tell if it's sensitive or not.

If I had put that on Twitter immediately, would the United States Air Force have continued or the navy continued with the strikes.

No, because then the Houthis would know that the planes are coming and they have air defense.

The president is sorry, but the president is accusing members of Congress of sedition, right, for simply stating the rules of war, but that's not a problem if we put out operational.

The whole thing is insulting to us.

I mean, I do think this goes back to the idea like here we are months later debating, you know, did the sun rise this morning.

I mean, you know, these facts are essentially on their face remarkable.

We all understand, and it's it's important that we have an inspector general is important that investigation is done, but the bottom line is the official leadership of the Department of Defense is at war with reality here in, in the response and you know the question I have that's completely unanswered is what if anything is going to, where is accountability for Pete Hegseth in terms of how he's running the Department of Defense.

What is Congress going to do about this?

Where is the oversight and accountability of this.

What I've seen is some statements from Republican members of Congress, including those with senior positions on Capitol Hill, basically saying like, oh, everything's fine here, move along, move along, which again is a remarkable It is an abdication of responsibility.

It's not exactly oversight, Nancy, let me ask you a question as a defense Department correspondent, currently in physical exile from the Pentagon, right, because, as we've discussed on the show in the past, you guys have basically been removed from you guys, meaning the entire press corps removed from the building because you refused to accede to their demands for review and other such issues, but you're a defense correspondent.

I'm a little bit surprised given all that's happened to you and the press corps and everything else and the fact that on the Venezuela strikes, they're not giving us any information about who they're striking or why.

I'm a little surprised that the Inspector General was the acting inspector general was felt free enough to actually criticize the Secretary of Defense.

That's a good sign for democratic oversight, no?

Yes, and I think the fact that he was acting was a was a was a factor in all this because he appeared to sort of approach the job with a willingness to lose it if he wrote something that went against what the department wanted to hear.

What we kept hearing from the Inspector general was a commitment to really answering the questions and not approaching this any other way but trying to get to the bottom of this.

I think the other thing that was a factor in in all this is.

in the military, you, you can say total exoneration, you can say case closed, you know, uniformed officers deal with this every day, so they were going to understand this issue better than most and weren't going to be able to, weren't gonna be as susceptible to sort of a spin on this because these are issues they deal with every day, and I think therefore the expectation is that the Inspector General treated with the seriousness with which we asked uniformed personnel to treat these issues every single inspector general's own credibility was on the line.

That's exactly inside the Department of Defense.

That's right, right, because there's this is something they deal with day in and day out.

Worth reminding people that the Secretary of Defense himself refused to speak to the inspector General.

No sense that he had any accountability to anybody, to your point about even answering questions, right?

No, no, no, they, the Inspector General used the signal chat that I published in The Atlantic as the evidence because it was disappeared from his phone, and they did not preserve the Secretary of Defense, nor did Mike Waltz, the then the national security advisor Mar co Rubio, the secretary, then nobody preserved the actual record, which wasn't official, obviously de facto official government communication.

That was one of the oddities of this whole thing.

I want to go to the um go to the, the, the bigger issue, the Venezuela issue, um, but I do want to note one thing, and I think Susan, you've got, got this, the aggressive defense doesn't seem to be working here.

I mean, they could yell exoneration.

but all you have to do is read the words, and you know that it wasn't exoneration.

What's the, what's behind the this this constant aggressive defense.

Yeah, I mean, look, that's a hallmark obviously of this administration and you have a lot of people at senior levels who were essentially imitating the boss, and that's how Donald Trump treats adversity.

He punches back harder.

He never admits wrongdoing.

He always fights back and so, you know, they're they're taking a page from the playbook, I think, of the Trump administration.

The question is also who they're speaking to with this defense, you know, it seems to me that Pete Hegseth has taken a sort of a Twitter view of being the leader of the Pentagon, and that is something that we've really never seen from a leader of the Pentagon.

He seems to be more focused on winning the social media spin wars than he is on actual wars, and I think this is pretty consistent with that, right?

Well, let's talk about the actual war that they claim to be waging against, I'm not exactly sure what the Venezuela-based cocaine cartels.

Let's, let's listen to uh what what the secretary, what Secretary Hagi, uh, said when he was discussing the most controversial of these strikes.

I watched that first strike live.

As you can imagine at the Department of War, we've got a lot of things to do.

So I didn't stick around for the 1 hour and 2 hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs.

So I moved on to my next meeting.

A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the, which he had the complete authority to do And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.

So you didn't see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike.

I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire.

It was exploded and fires smoke, you can't see anything.

This is called the fog of war.

This is what you and the press don't understand.

Nancy, do you understand the expression fog of war.

I've heard it.

I thought so.

Maybe by being a defense correspondent, you might have heard it once or twice.

So let's let's let's let's go to this.

Get up, get us up to speed on this, this controversy.

There have been a lot of boat strikes, 22 I believe.

That's right, more than 100 people seem to have been killed in these in these strikes.

What did Pete Hegev order and what did the Admiral in charge of this operation, Mitch Bradley, what did he order?

So on September 2nd, the United States launch ed the first of those 22 strikes.

There, their argument is that because there's no legal authorization under Congress.

Their argument is that there's an imminent threat.

The imminent threat is drugs coming to the United States, and we have to take these essentially self-defense measures in defense of the United States.

So we're going to strike these boats in international waters as they're transiting.

They conduct the first strike.

They they hit the back of the boat.

9 people were killed.

There are 2 who survive.

They see this through the drone video.

Admiral Bradley, who is the uh JSOC commander at the time.

JSOC is the special operations commander for that area.

That's right.

He's watching this with a military lawyer, and they're trying to assess, do we hit the, the boat what or what what do we do in response?

He went before Capitol Hill this week and presented videos showing this.

And what it showed is that these two were holding on the remnants of the boat, no bigger than a large table.

and, and there's maybe bales of drugs nearby, and they made the determination that they could potentially grab those drugs, grab or make some sort of movement to eventually get them across those waters ashore, eventually to the United States and conducted a second strike.

The reason it's so controversial is in the laws of armed conflict.

There's a thing called out of combat, which is you don't hit someone when they're out of combat.

So if you think about it, somebody waving a white flag, somebody who's wounded.

Think of um um someone who's a pilot who's flying and he's, he takes, he parachutes out of his shot jet.

When that pilot is coming down in the air, he's out of combat.

Once he's in the on the land and that hostile territory, he's back in combat.

In in in the water, you're out of combat when your vessel's been damaged, when you can't move.

Had they got onto another boat, had they moved in some way?

Had they had brought in other people, they're back in combat.

But the strike by everybody's measure happened when they were in the water, when there was no vessel nearby when there was no sign of sort of an imminent move by them to signal that they were coming back into combat.

So was it a war crime?

Well, it would be a remarkable thing, you know, George Will pointed this out in his really scathing column about Pete Heget this week.

It appears we're in a situation where there's a possible war crime without an actual war having been declared, and I think that's a really important point here.

Jeff, you know, we're talking, we've moved right, it's like we've skipped over the important question of what exactly the US is doing in the Caribbean, and we're right, we've got a sort of legalistic approach about what happened to these two people, but I would point out, and a number of legal experts have pointed out that not only is this not a war that's authorized by the US Congress, but the stated purpose of going after drug traffickers.

In this country, drug trafficking is not a capital crime, even if you were to be actually arrested and subject to the rule of law.

In fact, that was a point made just the other day by Mike Turner, a very senior Republican in Congress.

There's been no response with the administration has not released the legal justification under which this campaign is occurring, the administration has not released the evidence that it claims to have that these were in fact drug trafficking boats to begin with, and then of course you have this really remarkable fact that at the same time we're actually meting out death from the skies onto boats in the Caribbean.

Donald Trump this week pardoned the former president of Honduras, who is an actual convicted drug trafficker convicted in this country, convicted in this country through the rule of law on a truly epic scale of drug trafficking, so he's pardoned.

So why is it that we're going to war against drug traffickers.

It's a remarkable mess it seems to me, Peter, come up widen the optic a bit.

Obviously, the United States has a vested interest.

The government of the United States, the vested interest in keeping killer drugs off American streets out of American hands, right?

Although to be fair, fentanyl is the main drug threatening American lives, and this is not a fentanyl situation.

This is more a cocaine situation, as I understand, but stipulate terrible thing for people to bringing drugs in the country.

Um Susan points out, there seems to be different standards for different people here, but, but writ large, most Americans would say, well, they shouldn't be trying to boat in terrible drugs to this country.

So, so maybe Donald Trump is doing something to stop this plague, and I think he's relatively comfortable with that argument.

I mean, I think he thinks politically this is OK, that Americans aren't going to be upset about whacking bad guys, as he would put it.

Um, but imagine in your city where you live, and there was a house down the block that was known to be occupied by people who were selling drugs or thought to be occupied by people selling drugs because they haven't been convicted or anything.

And the police instead of raiding the house and arresting the people, use a bomb and blew up the house, right?

That's what we're talking about here.

The fact that happens in international waters doesn't change the facts that we are, are using, as Susan said, lethal force against people who haven't been convicted of anything, who do not pose an imminent threat under the traditional interpretation that people have used in the law of war.

And if I could just add, if you're interested in going after the drug problem in, in that part of the world.

We've already heard from our allies that they're afraid to share intellig ence because of the way that we're conducting these strikes, that these strikes potentially are hurting the kind of intelligence sharing and cooperation you need to really get at these root problems and develop the response such that you're actually stopping drugs from coming through.

The the administration hasn't demonstrated why these particular boats are headed towards the United States.

They certainly don't have the fueler capability.

All indications are that many of them are actually bound towards Europe and by violating potentially the laws of armed conflict, we're also putting our own troops in harm's way.

Imagine for example US troops are operating off the shores of Iran and and and a and a ship is struck and our sailors are holding on to life, and Iran decides that in the absence of the rules that they can go after our sailors.

I mean, they might do that anyway, to be fair, fair, but we, but we have we not made it easier?

Well, we're sort of eliminating the expectation of a sort of a rule-based order by by saying these rules don't apply or that we can be um redefine what it means to be out of right, and obviously it's worth noting that Americans in other wars have gone to prison for violating the rules that we're talking about, whether Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans do is another question entirely, but we're not.

Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, one of the main precedents, Jeff, goes back to World War II, and Nazi Germany, and you know, the Germans engaging in this conduct that we consider to be reprehensible and outside the laws of war when it came to arson, right, Nancy, let me in the minute we have left, let me ask you this question, political question.

Pete Hegseth causes a lot of headaches.

for the Trump administration, for their political operation.

How long does he hang on?

Why does Trump hang on to him?

We've heard that he likes him personally, and the president and what Pete Hegseth allows the president to do is to do these kinds of things with minimal questioning and pushback.

He has had an experience in the past under the first administration of a Pentagon that pushed back on the very things he wanted to do.

Of all the problems he faces from Peter Hegev, that's not one of them, right?

Any chance that we're seeing the end of the reign of Pete Hegseth soon.

I think you're seeing growing impatience because as you point out, lots of problems and, and not as many solutions s right?

Well, it's a fascinating conversation.

I have a feeling we'll be revisiting this.

Uh, thank you very much for the fascinating conversation.

We are going to have to leave it there for now.

Um, I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.

For more on Secretary Hegget's interesting week.

Please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.

Bye.

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CFP professionals are committed to acting in their client's best interests.

More information at let'sMakaplan.org.

Additional funding is provided by Ku and Patricia Ewens for the Ewan Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

Sandra and Karl Delay Magnusson.

Rose Herschel and Andy Shreeves, Robert and Susan Rosenbaum.

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Steve and Marilyn Kerman.

and my contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

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