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There is absolutely no doubt about it: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Admiral Mitch Bradley are war criminals. So is President Donald Trump. The premeditated killings of unarmed, noncombatant civilians in boats off the coast of Venezuela are war crimes under international law and murder under the U.S. Law of War, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Constitution. All three of these men should be tried as war criminals and sent to prison.
American journalist par excellence Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, recently hosted Judge Andrew Napolitano on his broadcast. Judge Nap served as a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995. He also served as a visiting professor at Widener University Delaware Law School, Seton Hall University School of Law and Brooklyn Law School. The transcript of this interview between Blumenthal and Napolitano below is must-reading.
Conservatives and evangelical Christians profess to be pro-law and order. But the Trump administration has proven that these two groups are NOT pro-law and order. They are as selective and biased regarding the rule of law as any of those on the political or ideological Left. They only care about law and order when it pertains to the opposite political party. Office holders within their own party (Republican) are free to commit the most heinous crimes known to man with not just impunity but also with their unequivocal support.
Here are excerpts from this interview. Please read them carefully.
Blumenthal: So, Judge, you have been making waves recently in a recent Newsmax appearance. You called Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, basically the Secretary of war crimes and questioned the entire legal rationale for what he's called Operation Southern Spear. This all relates to a September 2 strike, ordered by Admiral Mitch Bradley on a boat containing 11 men in the Caribbean. I don't know why you'd stack your boat with 11 men if you wanted to bring a lot of drugs into the U.S., or why you'd have such a small boat that can't even reach the U.S., but two men survived the initial strike, were clinging to the boat, and a second double-tap strike was ordered, apparently by Hegseth. What is your critique? Why did you call Pete Hegseth a war criminal?
Napolitano: The killing of the two people that survived really should not divert focus from the entire project, which is a series of war crimes. The idea that the President of the United States can use the military to kill people who he believes are about to commit a crime, even though at the time of their deaths, they're 1,500 miles away from the United States, is antithetical to the concept of due process.
It's pretty basic that under the Constitution, there's only two ways the government can kill anyone. That is pursuant to a declaration of war by the Congress, where the U.S. military is legally fighting the military and agents of the country against which we've declared war, or after due process, which is basically a fair jury trial with all the attendant rights and defenses that the Constitution requires the feds and the states to make available to you when they want your life, liberty or property.
So, it's pretty basic that the entire concept is a war crime. A war crime because it is the use of the U.S. military to kill noncombatant civilians. But I'm concerned that we lose sight of the bigger picture.
The other issue that brought this to everybody's attention was the rather courageous but incomplete video prepared by six members of Congress who themselves are veterans of the military or the intelligence community, in which they basically made a truthful statement, which is that you don't have to obey an illegal order. The president, of course, typically overreacted and said they committed sedition, they committed treason, they should be killed, executed. It's unclear if by killed he meant that they should be tried for a capital crime or that he would dispatch the military to kill them as he has these boat people.
Sedition is defined in the statutes as encouraging people to use violence to overthrow the government of the United States. Treason is defined in the constitution. It's the only crime defined in the Constitution, intentionally so, so that Congress or a president couldn't alter the definition. And it is well known as waging war in the United States or providing material assistance to those who are doing so.
So, neither of these statutes is relevant. They all know and we all know the illegal order is to kill civilians, to kill unarmed noncombatants. That's the illegal order.
The event on September 2, in which Pete Hegseth said he didn't have time to stick around to see who survived it, is defied by the Washington Post (which claims seven—seven—sources, they must be military or intelligence) who said that Admiral Bradley asked Hegseth, “What do you want me to do?” And Hegseth verbally said, “Kill everybody.”
The White House eventually admitted that Hegseth did that under some laughable theory of self-defense, that these two poor souls were injured, terrified, in the middle of the water, middle of the ocean, clinging to the debris of their boat, somehow posed a threat and needed to be eliminated, posed a threat to Admiral Bradley and his people. Admiral Bradley is a killer who should have left the Capitol building in shackles and handcuffs and been delivered to a military prison for a court-martial. The same can be said for Secretary Hegseth and anybody that obeyed these orders.
What I forgot to say earlier: About a month and a half after this horrible event on September 2, there was another killing where there were two survivors. This time the Navy went in and rescued them, and the DOJ said, “Well, we can't prosecute them. Send them back home.” So, those guys went back home. It shows that the DOJ profoundly changed its policy after this September 2 event.
It also shows that Trump and Hegseth have absolutely no knowledge of exactly whom they are murdering. The fact that there was no evidence that elicited criminal charges against these men whom Hegseth had just attempted to kill proves that Hegseth (with Trump’s blessing) is killing innocent civilians, as Max points out below.
Blumenthal: Using violence for its own sake. And if these were narco-terrorists, why were two of them repatriated to Colombia after being rescued, if they were such horrible crime lords? I mean, do we know the name of one person?
Napolitano: We ran [a video] yesterday on Judging Freedom of him [Hegseth] being interviewed by Fox and Friends in which he says to the hosts, “We knew who they were. We knew we killed all of them.” He didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Blumenthal: Yeah, and Pete Hegseth has been calling for essentially eliminating the rules of engagement. He did so in his speech at Quantico. He did so boasting about how he told his men in Iraq under his command to kill at will in his memoir released, I think, last year. And he's been talking about this for a long time.
Napolitano: He has referred to the rules of engagement as “stupid.”
This Secretary of Defense has become a monster.
Blumenthal: And what's the agenda here in seeking to eliminate the rules of engagement in staging this kind of fight over essentially longstanding military rules that have been broken again and again by many administrations, where you now have one of Hegseth's defenders in the House, Anna Paulina Luna, declaring that, “Well, Obama carried out hundreds of drone strikes, killing civilians in double-tap strikes. So why can't we?”
Napolitano: Wow. I mean, that is just a reprehensible argument. Nobody in government seems to have a moral compass anymore that she could make a statement like that and [Senator Tom] Cotton could make a statement like “it's righteous.”
I don't know where this goes, guys, because the Republicans in the House, with the exception of the great Thomas Massie, are all in lockstep with leadership.
Faithful readers know that I approach everything from both a Natural Law/Constitutional AND Biblical/moral perspective. In fact, I would argue that you cannot have one without the other.
That being said, I am absolutely appalled at the cold-hearted, murderous attitudes displayed by so many evangelicals today. As a lifelong evangelical Christian, it staggers my imagination and stuns my soul at how so many evangelicals so flippantly and persistently shrug off blatant criminality committed by the Trump White House and, by silent complicity, the GOP Congress.
Within Independent Baptist churches, conservative Southern Baptist churches, conservative charismatic/Pentecostal churches and many Dallas Theological Seminary-type churches there prevails much righteous indignation over a host of “sins” for which the guilty are condemned by any number of punishments.
Though social “norms” have relaxed some of the traditional “standards” by which these evangelicals judge “spirituality” or even someone’s salvation, there are still tens of thousands of pastors and church leaders who continue to condemn congregants who fracture their Christian “standards” by noncompliance.
I’m talking about things such as a man’s hair being too long or a lady’s hair being too short. What kind of music one listens to. And going to a movie theater to watch any film is akin to blasphemy. A lady’s dress being a quarter inch above the knee, and the “abomination” of a lady wearing pants. I’m talking about double standards for men and women whereby “Christian” men continue to flaunt their misogynistic attitudes toward women. I’m talking about the execution of all kinds of man-made rules, regulations and formalities regarding conduct that have absolutely ZERO basis in Holy Scripture.
For all of these “sins,” evangelicals are rigidly judgmental. They preach venomous sermons about them. They employ “church discipline” against those deemed guilty. They holler and scream their holy “convictions.” Anyone violating their fatuous rules couldn’t hold a position of janitor due to their “ungodly” conduct.
Yet, these same Bible-thumping defenders of “righteousness” are not even able to recognize—much less condemn—mass murder, mass rape, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity or serial sex crimes. Beyond that, they enthusiastically defend Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth (and anyone else in the Trump administration or Republican Party) who would participate in or cover up such atrocities.
This is beyond the pale!
And let me conclude with the almost never-discussed story-behind-the-story in the whole Venezuela fiasco. IsraelPalestineNews.org recently released an interview with retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, was interviewed on November 19, 2025 about what is going on in Venezuela
Wilkerson: And let me back up and give a little bit more explication of what's happening there. I'm 90% sure of this because I have some contacts still that will talk to me.
What has been going on has been a joint operation, maybe even more than a joint operation in terms of a third or fourth party, but there are certainly two parties in this.
One, of course, is the empire, the United States.
But the other, very substantively, is Israel. Israel is there big time. Israel has been there since the first finding in the 2016 year of Trump's first administration. Israel is a part of the intelligence picture, whether it's false, fair, accurate or whatever. And in most cases, I think it's false.
Israel is a manipulator of the intelligence that Trump is getting. One of the people giving Trump the intelligence is an Israeli citizen, dual citizen, of course, which is what we like to have in this country. But he's an Israeli citizen. He's linked with a former CIA individual who is giving money to Laura Loomer [and providing] intelligence from Venezuela that they say is accurate; and Trump is turning his face away from the vested intelligence community, starting with Tulsi Gabbard and others, and listening to Laura Loomer. So, he's getting his intelligence about Trinalagua, about drugs, and so forth, from a source that's being paid by certain members of the opposition in Venezuela to give him that intelligence. You can't make this up.
Israel is a big part of that, and the person who's working with the CIA operative is an Israeli citizen, as I said.
You've got the Nobel Peace Prize winner, as you said, Machado, who is plugged into it too. I will at least surmise that she might be a Mossad asset.
So, you have all of this going on. And then to come to your question, is any of this really going to overthrow Nicolás Maduro and the government he represents? I don’t think so. And I think it’s going to be a real disaster if we try to use major force, force majeure, to do it. Whether we sneak up on it or we frontally assault it, it makes no difference. We’re going to get our hands tied in a mess. Think Vietnam, think Afghanistan, think any of the wars that we’ve been involved in.
This explains why the Zionist-paid “conservative” podcasters around the country are bombastically promoting war against Venezuela. It has nothing to do with drugs. That’s easy to prove.
While Trump is murdering civilians in small boats in the Caribbean Sea, people he characterizes as “narco-terrorists,” he pardons one of the world’s foremost drug traffickers: the former dictator of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of trafficking over 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. You read it right. Over 400 tons!
And let’s not forget the CIA’s history of directly facilitating international drug trafficking. Read this report from the Congressional Record.
Donald Trump is a liar and a hypocrite! His attacks and potential war against Venezuela have absolutely NOTHING to do with drug trafficking. Venezuela is not even a minor provider of illegal narcotics into the United States. And Trump, Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi know it.
This is Trump’s political/financial agenda. This is an Israeli agenda. This is a neocon warmonger's agenda. And never forget this: This is also a giant WAR CRIME.
P.S. We have just released my latest Prophecy Package containing my most recent five Prophecy Messages. Find it here.
© Chuck Baldwin
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