Personnel as Policy in the Trump National Security Regime

The personnel decisions of the Trump national security regime provide a key to better understanding the actions and decision-making of the administration.

UPDATED: 5PM ET, 12/1/2025 Added reports on the Trump admin’s denials and Rep. Ro Khanna’s announcement of a bipartisan Armed Services Committee into Hegseth’s actions. Updates at end of post.

The stupid doesn’t just happen, it’s made to happen.

Let’s focus on one named player at a time and give a quick summary of their recent antics and explain how they fit into the larger Trump national security regime.

Pete Hegseth on the Hook?

Let’s start with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

I’ve covered Secretary Pete previously in such pieces as “Amway Oligarchy and Trump’s Willing Figureheads” from July and October’s “Shutdown, Clampdown, Clownshow or Horror Movie?”

Hegseth was nominated and confirmed to serve as Secretary of Defense, but in September POTUS Trump “first announced a proposed name change in early September when he signed an executive order that authorized Hegseth to adopt the title “secretary of war” and to use “Department of War” in official correspondence and public communications.”

NBC reports that making the name change officially official will possibly cost up to $2 billion and the next steps require the Pentagon to “submit paperwork to the National Security Council that would move the process forward to formally and legally provide Congress with what it needs to consider the name change.”

Regardless of the legal niceties, Politico reports that the military industrial lobby is on board with the change, as are most Republicans in congress.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) is a notable hold out, calling the name change “one more usurpation of the power of Congress.”

With the important stuff out of the way, let’s turn our attention to allegations of war crimes against Secretary Pete.

The below is in reference to attacks by the U.S. Navy on various boats off the Venezuelan coast. We’ve covered that threatened conflict many times previously (see here and here).

The Washington Post broke the story on Friday:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

Unfortunately for Hegseth, the umbrage on this one is bipartisan, if you count former Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-OH) as a Republican, that is.

House Speaker Mike Johnson removed Turner from the Committee in January when the current Trump national security regime took power.

When asked about the alleged “shoot to kill” orders on CBS’ Face the Nation, Turner responded, “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be- be very serious, and I agree that- that- that would- would be an illegal act.”

Turner also clarified that the incident is “completely outside of anything that has been discussed with Congress.”

Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Kelly were more emphatic in their condemnations, per the NYT, of what Hegseth is alleged to have done.

Kelly is one of six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a TV ad “urging current military and intelligence personnel to ‘refuse illegal orders,’ adding, ‘no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.’”

Trump’s response to that ad was to accuse the lawmakers of ‘seditious behavior,’ a charge that the president said could be ‘punishable by death,’ although he later walked back the death threats.

But that didn’t stop the FBI from reaching out to the seditious six (Sen. Kelly plus Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania) and attempting to schedule a good time to question them.

We’ll come back to Kash Patel and his Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), but let’s stick around coup country for a bit first.

New Information Emerges About 2020 Venezuelan Coup Attempt

One of the more hapless chapters of Trump’s first term in office was the attempt to install the virtually unknown nominal Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó into power.

New court filings obtained by The Gray Zone indicate that “High-ranking Trump officials including Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, the top CIA official in Latin America, and a top NSC advisor appeared to know about his invasion plot, and may have been involved in its planning.”

Among other things, the filings also expose “a proposal delivered to VP Pence’s office included plans to conduct ‘alse flag” operations in Venezuela, spread hepatitis within the country’s military, and fund the schemes through the “expropriation” of “drug product.”

The American Prospect has more details on that caper:

…a pitch deck obtained in discovery, which was produced for then-Vice President Mike Pence by a group called “Virtual Democracy.” It outlined a detailed 29-page regime change proposal consisting of sabotage plans including “contamination with hepatitis (A, B and C), influenza, measles and piglet to the social clubs where the top officials of the narco-regime meet” and “forced stoppage of public and private transport in all forms” that would culminate in the replacement of the Bolivaran constitution with a “simple federalist constitutional text that prohibits communism and socialism,” with training to commence on a North Carolina training camp operated by Constellis, formerly known as Blackwater.

That plan never got off the ground, perhaps because it required the Treasury Department to grant the plotters “a Swift clearance passport from the US government to transfer accounts of the US government an approximate amount of US $14,500,000,000 in assets expropriated from the narco-regime and make it available to Virtual Democracy.”

But don’t cry for Elliot Abrams, Argentina or Venezuela or anywhere else, the old chancer is keeping busy and still finding big platforms for his obsessive coup d’etat rantings.

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 1, 2025

Whether or not this iteration of the Trump national security regime presses forward with their bad intentions for Venezuela, Trump’s been busy just a little bit north of there, in Honduras.

Trump Pardons Honduran Narco-Pol

At the end of November, POTUS Trump posted the news to Truth social that he would be pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. He also strongly endorsed Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the current standard bearer for Hernández’ right-wing National Party.

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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 1, 2025

Hernández was convicted in a New York court in 2024 “of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as ‘El Chapo’, and of running his Central American country like a narco state.”

Hernández had been sentenced to serve 45 years in American prison.

His brother Juan Antonio Hernández was sentenced to life in prison March 30, 2021 in New York for trafficking tons of cocaine to the United States over 14 years.

Maybe Hernández made a very good choice in who he hired to lobby on his behalf in Trump’s first term, as VICE reported at the time:

(Hernández) signed a deal with a Washington lobbying firm called BGR Group to buttress his image as a dedicated ally and an implacable foe of organized crime.

Although BGR presents itself as a bipartisan firm, it has inextricable ties to the Republican Party. The company was co-founded by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Its current team includes prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican, and Trump Administration State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, who is on the firm’s advisory board.

BGR has also given more than $1 million to candidates for federal office in each of the last three election cycles, with roughly 90 percent of its contributions going to Republicans. Rubio is among the top beneficiaries of BGR generosity, and he has benefited from the company’s largesse throughout his career, including BGR-hosted fundraisers during both his 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns and his short-lived presidential bid.

Protestors celebrate outside the US Southern District of New York on March 30, 2021 after Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, brother of the president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez was sentenced to life for drug trafficking.

Immediately after taking on Honduras as a client -a contract which earned BGR $660,000 last year – according to mandated disclosures, BGR Group reached out to 11 Congressional staffers. Three of them worked or had worked for Rubio.

Later in the year, BGR lobbied the Development Finance Corporation, an arm of the U.S. government that connects developing countries with private investors. And throughout the year, the company attempted to improve the President’s image by circulating press releases to journalists from dozens of different news outlets, including VICE, detailing the head of state’s activities. BGR sent out three different press releases in October about Hernández: two about a trip he took to the United States, and one about joint U.S.-Honduras counternarcotics operations.

But Trump is a look-forward-not-back kind of guy and is presumably happy that Asfura currently holds a slim lead in the elections with over 60% counted so far.

But the Trump National Security Regime has a domestic component as well and this week FBI Director Kash Patel is drawing lots of attention.

Patel Blasted in the NY Post

It’s one thing when a Trump official is excoriated on CNN or in the New York Times, but when the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post runs with an ugly headline, that’s a different matter entirely.

Yesterday’s Miranda Devine column headlined, “Damning report labels FBI ‘rudderless ship’ under Kash Patel — with him and Dan Bongino more concerned with building ‘personal résumés’” would be bad for a more polished official with a broader base of support, for podcaster-turned-FBI-head Kash Patel, it’s potentially ruinous.

Here’s a taste:

A troubling new report card on the first six months of Patel’s leadership concludes he is “in over his head” and his deputy, Dan Bongino, is “something of a clown,” according to the alliance, which in two previous reports warned about crippling DEI and politicization of the FBI during the Biden administration.

The Patel-led FBI is described in the 115-page report as a “rudderless ship” and “all f–ked up.”…The report was written in the style of an official FBI intelligence assessment, analyzing reports from 24 FBI sources and sub-sources, and using anecdotes to illustrate troubling themes.

The case of the “medium-sized raid jacket” is one example.

On Sept. 11, 2025, the day after Kirk was assassinated, Patel flew into Provo, Utah, on the FBI jet but “would not disembark from the plane without an FBI raid jacket,” according to ALPHA 99, a “highly respected” source who has served in the FBI for multiple decades.

“Patel apparently did not have his own FBI raid jacket with him and refused to step from the plane without wearing one,” according to the report.…When a jacket belonging to a female agent was delivered to Patel on the plane, he complained that “two areas on the upper sleeves did not have Velcro patches attached.”

Patel would not leave the plane “until he had two patches to cover those areas” so “members of an FBI SWAT Team took patches off their uniforms and ran those patches over to” Patel “at the airport. The patches were then attached to the loaner FBI raid jacket” and Patel “disembarked from the plane.”

The report builds on negative headlines garnered by Patel for assigning an elite SWAT-team to protect his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins, a 27-year-old aspiring country singer and for allegedly misusing a private jet to pay visits to Wilkins when she works.

The allegations against Patel seem quite minor in comparison to the potential war crimes being notched against Pete Hegseth’s ledger and certainly nothing compared to those against the former Honduran president.

But for the sake of everyone working in the Trump national security regime, one hopes the POTUS is keeping his pardon pen sharp and filled with ink for any late term rescues that need to be issued before the whole thing comes a cropper, presuming it does.

UPDATE: 5PM ET, 12/1/2025

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The White House attempted to defuse a growing controversy over an attack on an alleged drug boat in September, saying an admiral who ordered a second strike that is reported to have killed two survivors had acted legally under authority granted him by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The Sept. 2 strike on the boat in the Caribbean—part of a continuing U.S. campaign against what the administration says is a terrorist drug-trafficking organization emanating from Venezuela—was the first in a series of such deadly attacks and drew renewed scrutiny over the weekend.…President Trump said Sunday that Hegseth told him that he didn’t issue the “kill everybody” order, but that hasn’t quelled the controversy and has prompted bipartisan calls from Congress for investigations. Trump added that he didn’t know anything about the attack sequence and that he believed Hegseth. “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men,” Trump told reporters. “And I believe him.” Asked about the survivors being targeted, Trump told reporters, “I wouldn’t have wanted that.”

On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the second strike while defending the actions, saying, “Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed, and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) says there is a major investigation coming:

🚨 Congressman Ro Khanna confirms that they are about to announce an “unprecedented” bipartisan Armed Services investigation into Pete Hegseth. pic.twitter.com/iAMjHiXwZu

— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) December 1, 2025