The Trump administration has already doomed its attempt to cover up a possible criminal act by embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to a conservative columnist.
Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal directive to "kill everybody" in a missile attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat, and the White House confirmed that Adm. Frank Bradley then ordered a follow-up strike after drone footage showed two survivors, but The Bulwark's William Kristol faulted the administration for releasing any information at all about the incident.
"Lying sometimes works," Kristol wrote. "I wish this weren’t the case. It would be nice if lying were always to fail. But, as we’ve all been reminded over the past decade, a determined and shameless liar can do pretty well for himself."
"On the other hand, there’s good news: If lies often succeed, cover-ups frequently don’t," Kristol added. "Lying can be pretty simple and easy. Cover-ups tend to be complicated and difficult. They require forethought and discipline on the part of their organizers. They often require enlisting the active cooperation — or at least the passive acquiescence — of lots of other people who were involved in the action being covered up. And so, they often fail.
Partial cover-ups are even harder to pull off, which Kristol said the administration had attempted with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
"The Trump administration would surely have been better off if they could have stuck to their original line that there was nothing more to see there and that they wouldn’t be releasing any material," he wrote. "But once they were forced down the slippery slope of providing some information, that’s when the trouble started."
President Donald Trump and his Pentagon chief would have been better off insisting that secrecy was necessary for military decisions and then attacked critics for coddling drug dealers, but they instead tried to get in front of the scandal by confirming the reports and then trying to justify the order.
"Now that they’re trying to explain and rationalize what they did, they’re probably on a path to failure," Kristol wrote.
Hegseth couldn't resist boasting that he was "the one to make that call" but claimed he was too busy to "stick around" to watch the second strike on drone video, but Kristol said his excuses were too flimsy to withstand even the slightest scrutiny.
"The second strike is Hegseth’s responsibility," Kristol wrote. "It’s a responsibility Hegseth obviously hadn’t wanted to publicize, as he never mentioned the second strike over the next months when discussing the operation, including when he boasted about it and showed video of the first strike only on Fox & Friends the next day."
Congress will almost surely obtain documents and sworn testimony now that Hegseth has discussed the sequence of events, and Kristol celebrated the cover-up's eventual failure.
"If the bad news is that lying can work, the good news is that cover-ups can unravel," he wrote. "Believers in our Republican government and defenders of the honor of our military should be determined to unravel this one."