The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, stated repeatedly in 2016 on Fox News that US service members should refuse “unlawful” orders from a potential president Trump – exactly the position he called “despicable” when Democratic lawmakers said it last month.
The debate about whether US soldiers should refuse illegal orders is now at the center of a fiery political dispute over the US killings of alleged drug traffickers in boats off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia.
In video unearthed by CNN from March of 2016, when Donald Trump was a Republican presidential candidate, Hegseth responded to Trump’s comments in a debate by clarifying that service members did, in fact, have a duty to refuse any illegal orders.
“You’re not just gonna follow that order if it’s unlawful,” Hegseth, then a Fox News contributor, said in an appearance on the show Fox & Friends, where he would eventually become a host.
He repeated similar comments in a Fox Business appearance later that month.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump had vowed that US military personnel would carry out orders including killing the families of terrorists and reviving banned forms of torture if he became president.
“The military’s not gonna follow illegal orders,” Hegseth said of Trump’s claim, which the candidate later walked back.
Hegseth is now embroiled in a controversy over a second strike on an alleged drug boat on 2 September, which killed two survivors of a strike less than an hour earlier. The administration’s strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific now number 20 and are reported to have claimed the lives of more than 80 people, who it says without offering evidence are smuggling narcotics.
Critics have described the attacks as illegal and extrajudicial killings, noting that the crime of drug-smuggling – even if true – is not subject to execution without trial. The administration has justified its attacks by declaring various groups as “narco-terrorists”.
In recent weeks, Hegseth has criticized Democrats for expressing concerns similar to those he expressed before Trump was elected.
Last month the Arizona senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats with service records posted a video that encouraged military personnel to disobey “illegal orders” from the Trump administration and warned of internal “threats to our constitution”.
The Pentagon announced it was launching an investigation into Kelly after Trump protested that the senator and the other lawmakers “should be in jail right now” and suggesting they might have engaged in “seditious behavior, punishable by death”.
Hegseth himself has accused the Democratic lawmakers of spreading “despicable, reckless, and false” information. On Saturday he compared suspected drug smugglers to al-Qaida terrorists. “If you’re working for a designated terrorist organization and you bring drugs to this country in a boat, we will find you and we will sink you. Let there be no doubt about it,” Hegseth said at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi valley, California.
He further argued that Trump had the power to take military action “as he sees fit” and he dismissed concerns that the strikes violate international law. “President Trump can and will take decisive military action as he sees fit to defend our nation’s interests. Let no country on Earth doubt that for a moment,” he said.
In 2016, however, he argued that service members could face criminal consequences for carrying out illegal commands, and said the military were obliged to refuse them.
“Here’s the problem with Trump,” Hegseth told the Megyn Kelly show on Fox after the debate in which Trump made the comments. “He says: ‘Go ahead and kill the family. Go ahead and torture. Go ahead and go further than waterboarding.’ What happens when people follow those orders, or don’t follow them? It’s not clear that Donald Trump will have their back.
“Donald Trump is oftentimes about Donald Trump,” he said, adding: ““If you’re not changing the law, and you’re just saying it, you create even more ambiguity.”
The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly in a statement to CNN repeated the administration’s position that the Democrat lawmakers who issued the video “sowed doubt in a clear chain of command, which is reckless, dangerous, and deeply irresponsible for an elected official”, adding that “the military already has clear procedures for handling unlawful orders, but seditious Democrats injected ambiguity”.
Hegseth made the same argument at an event in April 2016, as reported last week, telling the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley that the US military “won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief”. He added that refusing illegal commands was a part of the military’s obligation and ethical standards.
Last month, he called the Democrat lawmakers who made that argument the “Seditious Six”.
