The latest disclosures that Megyn Kelly and legal experts discussed this week raise serious questions about the Washington Post’s explosive account that Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a brutal “kill everybody” follow-up strike and that U.S. forces deliberately wiped out survivors clinging to a burning boat. Conservatives who have warned about lazy reporting and anonymous sourcing are vindicated as new reporting begins to peel back the story and expose inconsistencies in the Post’s narrative.
The Washington Post’s original piece painted a lurid picture: an initial strike that left men clinging to wreckage, a purported verbal order that no one be left alive, and a second strike that allegedly finished them off. That reporting provoked immediate outrage and calls for investigations, but the facts behind those dramatic claims have not been conclusively established and deserve far more scrutiny than the Post afforded.
Meanwhile the White House and the Pentagon have pushed back, insisting the operations are lawful and that Hegseth did not order illegal actions, while also defending the broader campaign against drug-running vessels as necessary to protect American lives. If mainstream outlets jump to weaponize anonymous fragments against a cabinet official without letting investigators or the chain of command speak, they are doing a grave disservice to truth and to our troops.
Most important, conservative reporting and commentary have highlighted a potentially decisive development: claims of intercepted communications involving a survivor and a narco-trafficker that could undercut the Post’s source chain and the timeline the paper presented. If those intercepts are authenticated, the story the Washington Post rushed into circulation begins to look more like a political hit piece than impartial journalism. The public deserves to see the intercepts and the underlying intelligence before reputations are destroyed.
Let’s also be clear about context: these strikes are part of a sustained campaign to choke off the cartels that flood our streets with fentanyl and other deadly drugs, and Americans expecting their leaders to defend the homeland shouldn’t watch that effort be sabotaged by selective leaks and theatrical headlines. Honest oversight is legitimate and necessary, but what we are witnessing is an eager media class ready to criminalize decisive action while reflexively excusing the cartels and the chaos they foment.
Patriots who care about both rule of law and national security should demand three things: full and transparent hearings from Congress, publication of the relevant evidence to settle the record, and an end to the media’s rush to convict on anonymous sourcing. Secretary Hegseth and our commanders deserve due process, not character assassination by a press corps more interested in headlines than justice.
