By The effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth failed in the House on Tuesday. By Saturday, a proposal for a far more radical step was drawing attention. Three former U.S. officials have urged foreign governments to quietly build murder cases against Hegseth and senior American commanders over strikes on suspected drug boats, then wait until President Donald Trump leaves office to bring charges.
The proposal predates the impeachment fight. In a May 27 essay for Just Security titled “International Accountability for U.S. Crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific,” former officials Sarah Harrison, Benjamin R. Farley, and Tracey Begley laid out how prosecutors in countries whose citizens died in the strikes might pursue the Americans who ordered them. White House correspondent Natalie Winters drew fresh attention to the essay Saturday, describing former Obama advisers as “openly calling for foreign countries to pursue criminal cases against Secretary Hegseth” in a post on Twitter.
Former Obama advisers are openly calling for foreign countries to pursue criminal cases against Secretary Hegseth.
Their proposal: “quietly gather evidence” now and wait until Trump leaves office to issue indictments. pic.twitter.com/jxfKyxXdyJ
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) November 14, 2026
The authors are explicit about the timing. Officials in Colombia, Ecuador, or other affected countries, they write, “could quietly gather evidence of the crimes and wait to issue indictments until Trump is out of office, and the White House is not occupied by the president who ordered the killings.” Murder charges in some of those countries carry lengthy statutes of limitations or none at all. A prosecutor could spend years assembling a case while avoiding an immediate confrontation with Washington. justsecurity.org
At the heart of the dispute is the administration’s use of military force against what it calls “narco-terrorists” in the Caribbean and Pacific. Hegseth has defended the strikes as lawful operations ordered by the president. The authors argue that the United States is engaged in no armed conflict with the suspected traffickers and that killing them amounts to murder under ordinary criminal law. Alongside Hegseth, they identify Adm. Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, and Gen. Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command. justsecurity.org
On Capitol Hill, Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie struggled to find a single Republican willing to join him. The House voted 211–204 to send his eight articles of impeachment to the Judiciary Committee, effectively killing his attempt to force a vote on Hegseth’s removal. Massie was the only Republican to oppose the referral. reuters.com
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) already has other impeachment targets in mind. When CNN’s Manu Raju asked about Hegseth and the incoming Democratic majority, the New York congresswoman turned the discussion to the Supreme Court. She has already introduced articles of impeachment against two of its conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Her 2024 resolutions accused both men of disclosure failures and of hearing cases from which she believed they should have recused themselves.
What makes the Hegseth proposal radical is what a foreign prosecutor could do that Congress cannot do through impeachment. Even if Hegseth were long out of office, a murder indictment could leave a former American defense secretary weighing the risk of arrest every time he traveled abroad. The authors acknowledge that securing evidence and obtaining custody would be difficult. But for the left, evidence and motive hardly mean anything when a political enemy is the target.
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