Breaking News from Pod Save America - BREAKING: New Details Put Trump Admin in MAJOR Legal Jeopardy

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Tommy & Ben explain why today was Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's worst day on the job yet. They react to the fallout from the Pentagon's congressional briefing about a US military airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean that experts believe was a war crime, break down the conclusions from the Pentagon’s long-awaited inspector general report on Signalgate, and discuss about what both tell us about Hegseth's political future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, Ben, today is shaping up to be far and away. The worst day of Secretary of War, Pete Hegsett's brief tenure leading the United States military. We're going to explain why. There's actually two different, distinct, but massive disasters. It's kind of swirling around Pistol Pete today. The first is this question about whether he ordered an airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean that was a war crime. And the second is the long-awaited report on Signalgate, which is when Pete used his personal phone. Do you share classified information with a group of individuals?

that included his wife and the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic. It's still funny when you say it out loud. So let's start with this war crime question and this airstrike in the Caribbean. Here is Congressman Jim Himes ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee from earlier Thursday. Admiral Bradley has a storied career, and he has my respect, and he should have the respect of all of us. But what I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service. you have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion

with a destroyed vessel were killed by the United States under the DOD manual for abiding by the laws of armed conflict the specific example given of an impermissible action is attacking a shipwreck any American who sees the

video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors. Bad guys, bad guys, but attacking shipwrecked sailors. People will someday see this video and they will see that that video shows if you don't have the broader context, an attack on shipwrecked sailors. All right. So what Congressman Himes was talking about there was the first of these airstrikes. There's now been 21 of them in the Caribbean or the Pacific that have killed 83 people. This is the first one, this was on a boat carrying 11 people and apparently drugs. It was hit with one airstrike. They watched it for about an hour as it burned. And then the Department of Defense noticed there were two survivors, after which time they fired a second missile at those survivors and

killed them and then sank the boat. So it sounds pretty horrific, Ben. I mean, Congressman Heimes is not someone who is prone to hyperbole. He sound pretty shaken there. Though I also don't really understand why he kind of came out of the gate and said Admiral Bradley had done the right thing given what he had just described. But what was your takeaway from that? Well, yeah, first of all, Congressman Himes is, you know, kind of one of these people that oversees the intelligence community and the military and is, you know, kind of pretty close to those people, right? So he's not like some lefty. He's not some bomb thrower. And so what I take away from that is number one. Him being as shaken up as he looked. I mean, he looked like he'd just seen a ghost quite literally.

tells you just how harrowing this video is, and him kind of giving the benefit of the doubt to the actual commander. Not that surprising. Yeah, not that surprising. Yeah. Look, I just think that you have to, you can't, it's hard to separate the fact that all 21 of the strikes are illegal from the kind of extra illegality of this one.

Because the fact of the matter is, for none of the strikes have they presented a credible legal basis, that the United States has any legal authorization from Congress to be taking these strikes, or that the United States is facing some imminent threat. And that's like the threshold for taking action against, you know, like this, right? The argument is that we're under attack from drug cartels and we're in an armed conflict with drug cartels. And their weapon of choice is like cocaine, I guess, is basically their argument. And this is what is so fucking crazy about this, right?

Because, again, like if we draw the analogy to drone, strikes against al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. That is legally authorized by Congress, an act of Congress, an authorization for the use of military force. And there's an argument that people can disagree with, but that if you're a member of al-Qaeda and you're plotting an attack or you are posing a danger to Americans. And again, backed up by a law passed by Congress. It's a very important point. In this case, I guess the argument they're making is that some people on a boat, like several hundred miles away from the United States, if not further than that,

with cocaine, that the cocaine is a threat to Americans. Now, that's fucking nuts because if that is the threshold, then the United States government could literally kill anybody with cocaine anywhere in the world, pretty much. You know, I mean, just think about that. Like, that's, and this is extra illegal, because I guess the guys in the boat, you know, when they get hit the first time, they're, I don't know, they're healthy, they might attack the drone. They still can't explain that. But again, when people are in distress, when people, as he says, have no locomotion, they can't even move. And then you're killing them. Like that, again, that's just a war crime, because war crimes

are set up, among other reasons, to let people have the capacity to surrender or to let wounded people be taken prisoner instead of being killed. You don't kill wounded people. You don't kill people who are surrendering. You don't kill people who are clinging on to a burning boat for their lives. Yeah, so I'm with you. Like, I think all 21 of these strikes are illegal. I think the idea that the U.S. is under attack from drug cartels or is in an armed

conflict with drug cartels is patently absurd and self-evidently so. However, like, there is clearly a greatly increased legal risk because of this second strike, given the context you just explained. There's clearly these guys are like stranded. They're helpless, basically. And under international law, and U.S. Department of Defense standards, you cannot shoot at a defenseless ship direct sailor. That's like spelled out very clearly as a scenario, right? And that's what's happening here.

So the New York Times got into, went deeper on the legal rationale, and it gets worse. Like the Pentagon argument goes like this. Drug cargo is a lawful target because cartels could sell the drugs and then use the profits to buy military equipment in like wage war on the U.S. or like attack us with the drugs, right? Which is crazy. But then they claimed that the second strike had to happen because the cartels could have picked up the survivors and then sold the remaining cocaine, I guess,

and then continued their attack on the United States. Like these guys were like they'd been blown up. They were on a boat that was sinking with a bunch of sopping wet cocaine. Like the idea that what were they going to do? Paddle to shore? Get a big fucking fan, dry off the cocaine, buy a new boat, take it to the United States

and go buy a tank. to attack the U.S. military? What are we even talking about here? That's literally the scenario they're saying. The burned up wet coke is going to be air-dried and traded for weapons. And that's the only way to call this self-defense. And again, this is disgusting on its face. This is a war crime and people should be held accountable for it. The other thing that to extend this, Tommy, though, you always have to watch where Trump is claiming more powers. If this is treated by anybody as credible use of force, think of all the other targets that he could make a similar argument about. If you can go this far afield,

then basically he could probably find a rationale to kill just about anybody in the world, right? Because it's like, you know, there's anybody who might sell something to get weapons to hypothetically attack us in the future, because that's what this is saying. Like, cocaine wasn't even coming to the United States. This boat wasn't going to come all the way from the fucking Caribbean to like Miami. It's a speedboat, right? So even in the worst case scenario that these are drugs, they're probably transiting somewhere else to some other island to move to somewhere else. Like, the chain of custody is so long that there's no imminence even with the cocaine getting here. And I think what we have to be careful about is not just the horror of this attack,

but if we allow Trump to have this kind of power, all bets are off because he can construct a rationale to kill just about anybody he chooses. Yeah, I'd also like to know where the nearest U.S. Coast Guard or naval asset was because presumably you could have just motorboated over there and picked these guys up and then sunk the vessel after you got them off the boat. There was, I was listening to something the other day, I can't remember what it was. Someone had interviewed like a former top lawyer at the Pentagon. And the amount of evidence that they're going to be able to sift through over there is pretty

remarkable because there's going to be video from every drone that was watching this target. there will be intercepted communications, maybe radio communications from these individuals. There's a communications platform that, you know, the Pentagon was using to communicate with the Navy SEALs who were in charge of the operation. That's all logged and saved. I mean, like, there's just going to be, like, lying about this will be very hard if members of Congress like Jim Himes are able to actually get their hands on this vast trove of evidence that, like, will record in real time what these guys were seeing. But, like, I just, I can't imagine any scenario where, these guys posed enough of a threat that you couldn't have just driven a boat over to them, pick them up, and then sunk this vessel later if you really thought it was a threat to navigation

or whatever. No, and we know in subsequent strikes when there were survivors, they just returned them to the country of origin. I mean, they clearly weren't like such hardened narco-terrorist or whatever he's calling them that they pose that kind of danger. And you're right. Like there are mostly with these kinds of operations, there are multiple surveillance drones, right? So different video angles. There's all kinds of intelligence gathering, including

recordings. There's going to be, you know, different kind of like emails exchanged about the strike. I mean, they can't destroy the evidence here. Like, it just, it lives forever. And they will have questions to answer about this forever. Agreed. Yeah. Also, there's some great reporting by the Wall Street Journal last night where we learned that Pete Higgseth actually forced out the for Star, who is the head of Southcom. Southcom is the area of operations that includes the Caribbean. He's in charge of all these U.S. military operations in the Caribbean. So this was Admiral Alvin Holsey, who, according to the journal, had voiced concerns about the

legality of hitting these Venezuela in boats with missiles. Hmm, sounds like he was prescient. Holsey was asked to resign by Pistol Pete in October about like a month into the bombing campaign. And I guess the message from Pete was kind of like, you're either with us or you're against us. And so they pushed, I think Holsey leaves maybe the end of next week. He leaves this job basically a year into what was supposed to be a multi-year assignment. Yeah, and curious what he has to say, too. I mean, that's the thing. There are lots of people that, you know, were present for these conversations, not just around the boat strike, but all the conversations leading up to this, where it seems

like questions were raised. And I think the main issue here is that Pete Hacks seems to think he can run the Pentagon like he's the producer of a Fox News television show, right? Like, his job is to beat his chest and to suck up to Trump and to post memes online. And, yeah, to go to some meetings and watch, like, these boats getting blown up. But the reality is he's interacting with military force, lethal military force, the laws of war, the potential for war crimes. Like, he's somebody who just behaves as if there's no gravity. And I think what he's beginning to find out, is, no, there actually are, like, even if you don't like them, there are rules and laws, and there are other people that follow them.

And this will be a huge test of whether the Trump administration can get away with just straight up ignoring the law, whether it's a law about taking a strike like this, or whether it's the Constitution that says the president can't go to war or take military force like this without any legal basis whatsoever. Yeah. Well, let's talk about gravity data point number two. So that is the Signalgate fiasco. The folks probably remember, you know, this was early on.

I think it was called a Houthi PC small group or something like that, Ben. This was them talking about coordinating strikes on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Then the National Security Advisor, Mike Walts, who got shipped up to New York and, you know, frog marches out of the White House afterwards, made this group of individuals on an unclassified signal chain. They all were using their personal phone and they were sharing classified information about this Yemen bombing run. So the Defense Department's inspector general has been conducting this report. So conducting this investigation. They released a report today on Signalgate.

I'm going to read a key passage to you, Ben. The secretary sent non-public DOD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory, over an unapproved, unsecured network approximately two to four hours before the execution of those strikes. Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send non-public DOD information through signal risks, potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DOD personnel and mission objectives. But Ben, the rub here is the Pentagon is claiming that Pete didn't actually mishandle classified information because even though he basically copied and pasted from the head of sentcom

information that was marked secret, no foreign, that means it's classified as secret and also no foreigners can look at it. He actually created a summary of it that magically made it no longer too sensitive to disclose and because he has declassification authority, everything he did was on the up and up. So case closed, right? If you're a QuickBooks customer looking to grow your business without the growing pains, you need the Intuit ERP. Upgrade to Intuit Enterprise Suite in a matter of hours.

It's the AI native ERP from the makers of QuickBooks. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Yeah, that presupposes that Pete Hegsef, like, before he like bragged to like his wife and Jeff Goldberg, which he did on the signal chain, that he had a thought process, right? He was like, well, I'm not cutting and pasting to, like, show off for my friends about these strikes. I'm going through a process of declassification. That is the least believable thing imaginable to me that Piedex had, like, lawyerly went through his head. Like, even though this is the same text, like, I'm actually just summarizing it. So it's

it's okay. Like this is so clearly a post facto justification for something that basically the IG version is like what all of us said about at the time kind of put through lawyer language. This is stupid. It's against the rules. It's by the way, far worse than anything. You know, they constantly were harping on like Hillary Clinton's email server or this or that. Like unimaginably stupid to do this and to put, well, you know, wasn't Pete who pistol Pee to put Jeff Goldberg on there. But, you know, like this would get people fired in a normal administration. That's the key point. Like, if this, if anyone below Pete did this, they would be fired.

And look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you, like, that I personally believe that this constitutes some grave risk to national security and the warfighters involved in the mission that the pilots could have been shot down. There is actually an outside chance. The Iranians are very good at intelligence collection. Or the Chinese, the Russians could have given it to them. Right. There's a non-zero chance that, well, there's probably pretty decent chance that those guys were on Pete Hexetz's comms because this is per se. personal phone and it's not hard to hack that shit. And they could have relayed that information to the Houthis, then they move or they put

U.S. forces at risk, whatever. There's no evidence that that happened. No. But it was certainly completely reckless when they are now lying about it in suggesting that he like, oh, actually, I had the foresight to declassify this, which is clearly bullshit. Also, Ben, you notice how this IG report keeps referring to the DOD? I wonder if that's going to get them in trouble over there at the, uh. Not the DOW.

Yeah. Not the DOW. Also, Dow. The Dow. The report says that Hags. Seth was reviewing this information from a skiff at his house. You couldn't even go into the office to do the hootie operation, you lazy fuck? Come on, man. Like, well, you know, maybe there's easier access to the liquor cabinet. I don't know, you know, who knows? But, I mean, like,

to tie this all back, like, is anybody surprised? I mean, by the way, this is not just about Trump and Hexeth. It's about all the Republicans that voted to confirm this clown. Because This was all clear what kind of guy this was. Like the recklessness, the drinking, the kind of weird personality, the reports of a temper, you know, like, and guess what we get? Exactly that, you know? And so maybe next time, because if, you know, Pistol Pete does go and we'll see, like, maybe they'll just put Marco Rubio in charge of the Pentagon, too, like everything else. But they nominate someone else. Can we please, like, have a few Republicans who stop and think about how fucking dumb it is to have Pete Hicks at running the

the Pentagon. It is crazy. It is crazy. The people who are in charge of the national security apparatus of the United States right now are like Pete Hegseth and Cash Patel and a bunch of clowns. By the way, also like this is like the military is an organization that demands accountability. Right. Like it's like an up and out or out system.

Like there is pretty harsh discipline. There's lots of rules and you can get whacked for pretty minor infractions. He declined to be interviewed for this IG report. Right. Like the buck doesn't stop here, apparently is the message Pete is saying once again about himself. But he's going to literally summon every single senior leader, all the generals from all around the world so they can watch him give a speech about staying in shape and getting your haircut. Yeah. Like a TED talk about fitness.

That's his basic. Ted talk about grooming by some preening Fox News asshole. Anyway, look, I like Trump has promised to release. Trump yesterday in the Oval Office, I think, or maybe it was the cabinet meeting. I don't remember anything anymore. He was asked about whether the U.S. should release the full tape. He said we would of the strikes in the boats in the Caribbean. If it's as bad as Jim Himes described, I doubt they will live up to that promise,

but, you know, we should hold them to it. I think the public should get to see this stuff. In a just world, there would be some accountability, and Pete Hex-F would have been fired during Signalgate and, you know, would be fired now over this disaster. over the boat strikes, but, you know, there's no indication yet that Trump is willing to do that. And if I'm Congress, and you have Republicans actually into this, like, are concerned about it, I would be demanding that the lawyers who write whatever legal justification come up and testify.

Me too. Because this will be like trying to find someone to prosecute James Comey, you know, because those lawyers have to think about the rest of their careers. And so I'd like someone to stand up there and in front of Congress explain, in their own words, why this is legal. Because I think they'd have to probably scrape the absolute bottom in the barrel to find anybody willing to do that.

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