WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who both gloated about the killing of alleged drug smugglers back when it happened, on Wednesday continued blaming a Navy admiral for launching a follow-up attack on survivors clinging to the wreckage — an act described as a war crime in a U.S. military manual.

Hegseth, who early on said he watched the Sept. 2 attack off the Trinidad coast live as it was happening, on Tuesday clarified that he saw only the initial attack, not the follow-up.

“As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, or whatever,” he said, using Trump’s nickname for the Department of Defense in a question-and-answer session following a meeting of Trump’s Cabinet at the White House.

Hegseth then said Adm. Frank Bradley, on his own, decided to launch the second strike that killed the survivors.

“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.”

The U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual defines that exact circumstance as an unlawful killing: “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”

Trump, for his part, pleaded ignorance of any of the details: “Somebody asked me a question about the second strike. I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about people. I wasn’t involved in it. I knew they took out a boat, but I would say this, they had a strike.”

Then Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claim that the boats in question — all of which have been too small and ill-equipped to have been traveling to the United States ― have been carrying fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can kill in even minuscule doses.

“Every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000, on average, lives, 25,000 lives. They’ve been sending enough of this horrible fentanyl and other things like cocaine and other things. But fentanyl right now is the leader of the pack to kill our entire nation because a little speck on the head of a pin can kill somebody,” Trump said.

In fact, the vast majority of fentanyl coming into the United States is carried across the U.S.–Mexico border by U.S. citizens. Historically, the drug trafficked through the Caribbean is cocaine, and much of that is destined for North Africa and Europe.

Neither the Defense Department nor the White House has ever offered any proof of Trump’s fentanyl claim, and neither did so Tuesday in response to HuffPost’s queries on the topic.

President Donald Trump speaks as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth looks on during a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

At the time of the attack, Bradley led the Joint Special Operations Command, and has since been promoted to run the U.S. Special Operations Command. Queries to SOCOM, as it is known, to reach him did not receive a response.

Tuesday’s remarks were the most extensive public comments on the topic by either Trump or Hegseth since the Washington Post published an account of the Sept. 2 attack detailing the follow-up – or “double-tap” – strike that killed the two survivors of the first strike.

A different attack in October also left two survivors, but in that case, they were rescued by the Navy and sent back to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador — raising the question of how the survivors of the Sept. 2 attack could be so dangerous that they had be killed rather than interdicted and arrested, when the October survivors were considered so harmless that they could be released.

At Monday’s White House briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that there had been any change in protocols for dealing with survivors following the Sept. 2 strike.