In the matter of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War. Brief for the prosecution.
I. The charge
Ordering the killing of shipwrecked survivors on September 2, 2025. The charge is the unlawful killing of persons hors de combat. Treason is set aside for the moment because it needs an army in the field or adherence to an enemy. The charge the record supports so far is enough.
II. Statement of facts
- On September 2, 2025, United States forces struck a boat in the Caribbean. Reporting places a verbal order from Hegseth before the operation: “kill everybody.”
- Two survivors were seen clinging to wreckage. Roughly two hours later a second strike killed them. The White House confirms the second strike and attributes the order to Admiral Bradley, acting under Hegseth’s authorization.
- Hegseth first said he watched the operation live, then said he left before the second strike and saw no survivors in the “fog of war.” Both statements are his.
- The campaign continued. Just Security’s running timeline put the count at 72 strikes and 243 dead by late October 2026.
- On September 15, 2026, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, read eight articles of impeachment on the House floor, charging that Hegseth directed the unlawful use of deadly force in the boat strikes. The Speaker sent the House home a day early to avoid a vote.
III. The rule
The Department of War’s own Law of War Manual forbids attacking the shipwrecked. Legal experts reviewing the September 2 orders found them self-evidently unlawful, because they ordered no quarter, and found the second strike an attack on persons hors de combat. Representative Mike Turner, a Republican, put the civilian version plainly: had the survivors been captured and convicted, they would have gone to jail, not been executed.
IV. The defendant’s own standard
The tribunal is asked to apply the standard the defendant has applied to others.
- Exhibit A, 2019. Hegseth privately lobbied the President to pardon Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two civilians, Mathew Golsteyn, charged with murdering a detainee, and Edward Gallagher, charged with stabbing a prisoner. He told his audience “these are the good guys.” Three trials, erased.
- Exhibit B, 2025. “Kill everybody.” Two men in the water, no capture, no trial.
- Exhibit C, 2026. Hegseth announced the Pentagon would livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, a man who received a court-martial, a conviction and thirteen years of appeals. Hegseth took a lawful sentence and tried to make it a broadcast. The President withdrew it.
The pattern across all three exhibits is the removal of the trial. The pardons removed trials already held. The order removed a trial that should have followed capture. The livestream removed the dignity a trial had already secured.
V. Precedent
On October 19, 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Grant that captured Black soldiers belonging to Confederate citizens would be returned to their owners rather than exchanged as prisoners of war. Grant refused every exchange on those terms. Lee put in writing that captured men were property, and he commanded on that basis to the end.
In June 1865 a federal grand jury indicted Lee for treason. Grant stopped the trial. Lee died obscured, at home in 1870, with barely a thousand mourners. Within two years the men who lost the war began fabricating him into a myth that now sits on a Georgia mountain protected by statute. The absence of the trial is the only thing that ever saved Lee, and the cost of that absence ran a century.
VI. Relief sought
A trial. Charge, evidence, witnesses, verdict. The September 2 video and the Justice Department memo entered into the record. Admiral Bradley under oath. The sentence belongs to the court and to no one else.
That is the one thing the defendant has denied to every person he has judged. It is the one thing the record now demands for him.