A House Democrat has pledged to file two articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over his actions against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and his part in the “Signalgate” scandal.
In a video posted to social media, Michigan Democrat Shri Thanedar explained: “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is uniquely unqualified for his role. Every day, it becomes clearer he is engaging in unlawful, illegal activity.”
Thanedar said the first would be “for murder and conspiracy to murder” over the deadly strikes on alleged narco-boats and the second for the “reckless and unlawful mishandling of classified information,” referring to Hegseth discussing plans for an airstrike on Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this year in a group chat on the messaging app Signal.
The congressman went on to lay out his case against the secretary and concluded: “I love the United States of America and will always fight to uphold our Constitution. Pete Hegseth must be brought to justice.”
Thanedar also appeared on Fox News Thursday night to explain his move, telling host Josh Breslow: “This secretary has to go. He’s incompetent. He’s, you know, violated – he has committed war crimes. He must go.
“And if both parties, if Republicans are willing to look at this for the merit of this case and not just their loyalty to President [Donald] Trump, this can be done.”
He cited the House and Senate coming together in near-unanimous agreement to compel the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files last month as an example of what can be accomplished in the spirit of bipartisan co-operation.
“If Republicans are willing to look at this for the merit of this case and not just their loyalty to President Trump, this can be done,” he said.
“Republicans need to look at this as laws that have been broken. War crimes have been committed. And Hegseth – the secretary is refusing to show up.”
Thanedar previously filed articles of impeachment against Trump himself in May and was attacked Thursday by Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, who called his impeachment push “another charade in an attempt to distract the American people from the major successes we have had” at the Department of Defense, also known as the Department of War.
“While Shri tries to win points with his base to fend off his political opponents, Secretary Hegseth will continue to protect the homeland,” she added.
The Democrats’ announcement came on the same day that U.S. Southern Command reported its latest strike on an alleged drug boat in the Pacific, which, it said, killed four people, taking the total number of fatalities from the operation to at least 86.
That came just hours after Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the Navy SEAL officer who leads U.S. Special Operations Command, had appeared on Capitol Hill to show footage to members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees of the first of the known lethal strikes, conducted on September 2.
Admiral Bradley had been summoned to answer questions after it was alleged that Hegseth had ordered a second missile strike to “kill everybody” when two survivors were spotted clinging to flotsam in the ocean following the initial blast.
Connecticut Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, emerged from the session aghast, telling reporters the video was “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”
Hegseth has insisted the decision was taken amid the “fog of war” and insisted that the admiral had acted “within his authority and the law,” only to have to counter allegations he was ducking responsibility himself.
The Signalgate affair, which erupted in March and led to the ousting of Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz, has also come back to bite Hegseth this week.
The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General published a report on Wednesday concluding that the secretary had put the lives of U.S. pilots at risk when he discussed the planned actions against the Houthis and had violated departmental policy by using the commercially available encrypted messaging app rather than internal channels of communication.
The error of judgement was compounded by the accidental inclusion of The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in the group, who duly published a story under the headline “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” and created the first major scandal of the president’s second term.
