Secretary of War Pete Hegseth chastised the press following media reports that he signed off on a second strike against an alleged drug boat after the first one left survivors. 

The Trump administration has come under renewed scrutiny for its strikes in the Caribbean targeting alleged drug smugglers, after the Washington Post reported on Friday that Hegseth verbally ordered everyone onboard the alleged drug boat to be killed in a Sept. 2 operation. The Post reported that a second strike was conducted to take out the remaining survivors on the boat. 

On Monday, the White House confirmed that a second strike had occurred, but disputed that Hegseth ever gave an initial order to ensure that everyone on board was killed, when asked specifically about Hegseth’s instructions.

Hegseth said that he watched the first strike live, but did not see any survivors at that time amid the fire and the smoke — and blasted the press for their reporting.

‘This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand,’ Hegseth told reporters at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. ‘You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nit pick, and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.’ 

Hegseth said that after watching the first strike, he left for a meeting and later learned of the second strike. The White House said Monday that Hegseth had authorized Adm. Frank ‘Mitch’ Bradley to conduct the strikes, and that Bradley was the one who ordered and directed the second one. 

At the time of the Sept. 2 strike, Bradley was serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, which falls under U.S. Special Operations Command. He is now the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.

According to Hegseth, carrying out a subsequent strike on the alleged drug boat was the right call. 

‘Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,’ Hegseth said Tuesday. 

Meanwhile, reports of the second strike have attracted even more scrutiny from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill and calls for greater oversight, amid questions about the strikes’ legality. 

‘This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean,’ Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., who lead the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Saturday. ‘We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.’

Hegseth said Tuesday that although there has been a pause in strikes in the Caribbean because alleged drug boats are becoming harder to find, the Trump administration’s campaign against the influx of drugs will continue. 

‘We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,’ Hegseth said. 

The Trump administration has carried out more than 20 strikes against alleged drug boats in Latin American waters, and has bolstered its military presence in the Caribbean to align with Trump’s goal to crack down on the influx of drugs into the U.S.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is seeking to reform the funding structure for presidential libraries in an effort to reduce reliance on taxpayer funding for operational costs and allow NARA to focus more on preserving and providing access to records. 

Fourteen presidential libraries fall under the National Archives system, and that number is expected to jump to 16 for presidential libraries dedicated to Trump and former President Joe Biden. 

While NARA and the presidential foundations have their own individual agreements outlining cost-sharing burdens for these presidential libraries, taxpayer funding is going toward maintenance costs, including mowing lawns, painting walls and cleaning toilets at nearly all these buildings, according to NARA. 

Additionally, the government contracting process for quick repairs like broken door hinges filters through an approval process in Washington and can take weeks or months to be addressed, the agency said. 

As a result, NARA is in the process of negotiating with each presidential foundation on an individual basis so they can take greater ownership of the operational responsibilities for their specific library, Jim Byron, senior advisor to the archivist, told Fox News Digital.

‘Despite decades of well-intentioned oversight and stewardship of America’s presidential libraries by the National Archives, reality now dictates that operational changes can and should be made to ensure the long-term health of these American treasures,’ Byron said in a statement to Fox News Digital Monday. 

‘Presidential libraries have grown in scope and purpose, and with that growth — and with anticipated future additions to the system — comes increased expenditures to be borne by the American taxpayers.’ 

NARA spends $91 million annually on presidential libraries from appropriations, and the deferred maintenance costs across the entire library system total roughly $123 million. 

Under current negotiations that launched in the spring between NARA and the presidential foundations, shifting some of the costs to the presidential foundations is expected to save NARA $27 million. These funds will then be shifted toward NARA’s primary mission of preserving and sharing records, including digitizing and releasing more files, Byron said.

In the event that changes aren’t made to shift more operational costs to presidential foundations, NARA’s ability to focus on its mission will be jeopardized, according to Byron. 

‘The alternative is to do nothing and allow NARA’s appropriations to go to lawn care and toilet cleaning at the expense of FOIA processing, to close all presidential libraries when the government shuts down, to allow a deferred maintenance backlog to grow and to regret that presidential library structures were not addressed,’ Byron said. ‘The National Archives is committed to making sure that doesn’t happen while delivering for the American people.’

Luke Nichter, a history professor at Chapman University who said he averages 100 days annually for research and interviews with former government officials, told Fox News Digital that, given the constraints of the federal budget, it’s necessary for presidential foundations to shoulder more of the cost for upkeep of these presidential libraries.

‘It now takes about as much money to build a presidential library as it does to run for president — about a billion dollars,’ Nichter said in an email to Fox News Digital Tuesday. ‘The American taxpayer should not bear that. The administration deserves credit for starting an important conversation about the future of these cherished institutions.

‘In the future, the National Archives will have to focus more closely on what it does well — the preservation of federal and presidential records — and leave other functions to the presidential foundations.’ 

This most recent effort aligns with other initiatives underway at the National Archives aimed at redirecting efforts to the agency’s mission, including working with other agencies to release the John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Amelia Earhart files. 

The presidential library structure varies, and NARA and each presidential foundation have their own separate public-private agreements. Typically, though, private funds are used to create a presidential library, which NARA then oversees using federal funding.

But this isn’t always the case. For example, the Obama Foundation is an entirely private entity and did not choose to construct a library for NARA to store documents, instead opting to build a private presidential center and private museum. As a result, NARA digitized and stored Obama presidential records at an existing NARA site and still oversees preserving and providing access to those records. 

Previous efforts to revamp the funding partnership between government and private entities successfully occurred in 2018, when NARA coordinated with each presidential foundation to discuss which operations it could take on amid increased budget constraints. Ultimately, those negotiations led to NARA and the George W. Bush Foundation securing a new deal splitting operational costs. 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth chastised the press following media reports that he signed off on a second strike against an alleged drug boat after the first one left survivors. 

The Trump administration has come under renewed scrutiny for its strikes in the Caribbean targeting alleged drug smugglers, after the Washington Post reported on Friday that Hegseth verbally ordered everyone onboard the alleged drug boat to be killed in a Sept. 2 operation. The Post reported that a second strike was conducted to take out the remaining survivors on the boat. 

On Monday, the White House confirmed that a second strike had occurred, but disputed that Hegseth ever gave an initial order to ensure that everyone on board was killed, when asked specifically about Hegseth’s instructions.

Hegseth said that he watched the first strike live, but did not see any survivors at that time amid the fire and the smoke — and blasted the press for their reporting.

‘This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand,’ Hegseth told reporters at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. ‘You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nit pick, and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made.’ 

Hegseth said that after watching the first strike, he left for a meeting and later learned of the second strike. The White House said Monday that Hegseth had authorized Adm. Frank ‘Mitch’ Bradley to conduct the strikes, and that Bradley was the one who ordered and directed the second one. 

At the time of the Sept. 2 strike, Bradley was serving as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, which falls under U.S. Special Operations Command. He is now the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.

According to Hegseth, carrying out a subsequent strike on the alleged drug boat was the right call. 

‘Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,’ Hegseth said Tuesday. 

Meanwhile, reports of the second strike have attracted even more scrutiny from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill and calls for greater oversight, amid questions about the strikes’ legality. 

‘This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean,’ Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., who lead the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Saturday. ‘We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.’

Hegseth said Tuesday that although there has been a pause in strikes in the Caribbean because alleged drug boats are becoming harder to find, the Trump administration’s campaign against the influx of drugs will continue. 

‘We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,’ Hegseth said. 

The Trump administration has carried out more than 20 strikes against alleged drug boats in Latin American waters, and has bolstered its military presence in the Caribbean to align with Trump’s goal to crack down on the influx of drugs into the U.S.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday charged five men from across the U.S. with running an online ‘child exploitation enterprise’ called ‘Greggy’s Cult,’ that allegedly used Discord servers to terrorize, blackmail and coerce minors into ‘horrific acts of self-harm.’

The indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors charges five individuals with ‘conspiracy to produce child pornography, conspiracy to receive and distribute child pornography, and conspiracy to communicate interstate threats.’

Hector Bermudez, 29, of Queens, New York; Zachary Dosch, 26, of Albuquerque, New Mexico; Rumaldo Valdez, 22, of Honolulu, Hawaii; David Brilhante, 28, of San Diego, California; and Camden Rodriguez, 22, of Longmont, Colorado, were arrested Tuesday will be arraigned in the Eastern District of New York at a later date, according to the DOJ.

Prosecutors described a ‘nightmarish platform on the internet,’ alleging that ‘Greggy’s Cult’ carried out ‘depraved conduct’ that included ‘repeatedly encouraging victims to kill themselves or encouraging them to insert household objects into their genitals or anus.’

‘These five defendants allegedly targeted vulnerable children and others via online platforms – they exploited, threatened, and harassed them, and encouraged horrific acts of self-harm,’ FBI director Kash Patel said in a statement. ‘The FBI is sending a message to those individuals involved in criminal activity through violent online networks: you can’t hide in the shadows hovering over a keyboard – we will find and hold accountable those who participate in these illegal and heinous acts.’

The indictment stated that the defendants allegedly engaged in the ‘production and distribution of child sex abuse material’ between January 2020 and January 2021, and also participated in other forms of ‘exploitation and harassment’ of both minors and adults.

According to prosecutors, the defendants and other members of ‘Greggy’s Cult’ met on Discord servers and ‘directed minor victims, who had joined a video call on either Discord or another video conferencing platform, to engage in sexually explicit or other degrading conduct.’

The group is also accused of finding victims on gaming platforms such as Roblox and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

The cult members allegedly captured screenshots and screen recordings of the ‘sexually explicit conduct’ before sharing it to other Discord servers and with each other, according to the DOJ.

Attorney General Pam Bondi reacted to the indictment, stating that ‘no child should ever be terrorized or exploited online, and no online platform should give refuge to predators.’

‘The Department of Justice will continue to protect children, support survivors, and hold accountable anyone who preys on the vulnerable – online or offline – with every tool we have,’ Bondi added.

Prosecutors also accused the defendants of extorting their targets, alleging that they tried to frame the adult victims as pedophiles or send malware to minor victims, which was then used as ‘leverage to get the victims to engage in degrading acts on camera.’

The defendants were allegedly able to convince victims to commit acts of ‘degradation,’ including having them be ‘owned’ by a member of the cult to demonstrate loyalty, or writing the names of cult members on their bodies, which prosecutors referred to as ‘fansigning.’

Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Galeotti of the DOJ’s Criminal Division said in a statement that the defendants were charged with an ‘unspeakable act of coercing and blackmailing children and adults to engage in self-harm and other degrading acts.’

U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. for the Eastern District of New York called the alleged conduct ‘monstrous,’ adding that children were ‘at times driven to the brink of suicide.’

The DOJ stated that ‘Greggy’s Cult’ formed before the emergence of the ‘764’ network, another online child-exploitation group that the FBI has launched an intensified effort to take down.

Members of ‘764’ allegedly use popular online platforms such as Discord, Telegram and Roblox to recruit and manipulate minors.