Free Republic

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed on Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the second, follow-up strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September following a bombshell Washington Post report that claimed he ordered the military to “kill everybody.” Leavitt told reporters at the White House press briefing that Hegseth authorized Adm. Frank Bradley to carry out the second strike, which reportedly killed two people who were hanging onto the burning vessel after an initial strike. “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have made it clear that presidentially designated narco-terrorist groups are subject to lethal targeting...

A September 11 commission co-chairman talks about the damage done by the latest New York Times leak. By Byron York Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, was briefed several weeks ago about the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance program, and after the session, Kean says, “I came away with the idea that this was a good program, one that was legal, one that was not violating anybody’s civil liberties…and something the U.S. government should be doing to make us safer.” Kean tells National Review Online that the New York Times’s decision to expose the terrorist finance effort — Kean...