WASHINGTON – (WBAP/KLIF) – President Donald Trump on Tuesday holds the 9th Cabinet meeting of his second term,
addressing escalating tensions with Venezuela, and questions increasingly focus on the administration’s campaign against alleged drug boats in the region. ‘
The meeting comes amid increased scrutiny of the Pentagon’s handling of military strikes on the boats in the Caribbean and Pacific in the wake of a Washington Post report that said the military launched a follow-up strike on Sept. 2 that killed two survivors of an initial attack.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Monday that a second strike occurred, although she said a Navy admiral, not Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, gave the command to hit the boat again. Neither the president nor Hegseth addressed the report directly in their opening remarks, but the president said Hegseth is “doing a great job.” The secretary, seated next to Mr. Trump, said the boat strikes have “only just begun,” and said the commanders in charge of the strikes have “done the right things.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated on the Pentagon’s targeting of alleged drug boats, including in the case of the boat that the White House has acknowledged was struck twice – killing two survivors on alleged orders there should be no survivors. “As I’ve said and will say again, we’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth said. “Because they have been poisoning the American people.
“As President Trump always has our back, we always have the backs of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations. And we do in this case, and all these strikes. They’re making judgment calls, ensuring that they defend the American people. They’ve done the right things, we’ll keep doing that, and we have their backs, Mr. President,” he said.
Before the Cabinet meeting, Hegseth’s press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, said during a briefing at the Pentagon that the president and secretary are ultimately the ones responsible for the strikes.
Trump’s stated military focus on Venezuela being stopping the flow of illegal drugs raises new questions as Trump pardons former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez; freed today, after being convicted in a U.S. Federal Court with multiple testimonies indicating he used the Honduran military, National Police, and Attorney General’s office to ensure what American federal drug officials indicated was a staggering amount of tonnage of cocaine flowing through his country and northward on a path to the United States. JOH was sentenced to 45 years in a U.S. federal prison, for which he began serving time this year. Over the weekend, one of the attorneys for JOH made mention of his “triumphant return to Honduras”; a country in which he will likely face charges related to that for which he was convicted in the United States, should he return.
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