Democratic Congressman Suggests Execution for Pete Hegseth
It was a message that was implicit, but unmistakable.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts used an interview with CNN Wednesday to accuse Secretary of War Pete Hegseth of being guilty of “war crimes” for his handling of the American military and its attacks on suspected drug runners bearing deadly cargo destined for U.S. shores.
And the punishment, Moulton implied, is execution.
Less than a week after an assassin tried to kill the President and the War Secretary, Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton says Pete Hegseth should be executed:
Erin Burnett: “Do you believe that the Secretary of Defense is guilty of war crimes?”
Moulton: “Absolutely. I mean, he’s… pic.twitter.com/XYMyGDZQww
— Julia (@Jules31415) April 30, 2026
“I mean, he’s clearly behind the operation to shoot all these boats in the Caribbean, when it’s very unclear that we actually have any confirmation that these so-called narco-terrorists — a term the administration invented to justify this action — are even on the boats,” Moulton told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
“I mean, in fact, there‘s a lot of evidence that these are just fishermen, you know, getting jobs, piloting these boats, trying to feed their families.”
But it wasn’t enough to accuse Hegseth of masterminding what amounts to murder. Moulton had to go even further, recalling the September strike by the U.S. military on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea that used a follow-up attack to get those who survived the first.
“And on top of that, we then have the strike where they came back and hit it again — a double tap — just purely to kill these survivors who were clinging to wreckage.”
Moulton continued, ominously: “You know, it‘s interesting, Erin, another historical analogy: Back in World War II, the Allies tried Nazi submarine captains for doing this exact same thing. And guess what the conclusion was? They got executed,” Moulton said.
“Listen to that, Mr. Secretary.”
Moulton had at least part of his story correct. But it’s what he didn’t get right that matters the most.
According to Naval History, a magazine of the private, nonprofit U.S. Naval Institute, the Nazis in question were German Navy Kapitänleutnant Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, commander of the Kriegsmarine U-boat 852, and two immediate subordinates. Their submarine sank a Greek cargo ship, the Peleus, in the South Atlantic in 1944, then machine-gunned survivors clinging to the wreckage.
They were convicted of war crimes and executed in Hamburg, Germany, on Nov. 30, 1945, six months after Germany’s surrender.
What Moulton is ignoring, among other things, is that the admiral who commanded the September attack told Congress in December that the men who survived the initial strike were communicating with other elements in their drug-smuggling network and “attempting to continue their drug run, making them and the already-damaged vessel legitimate targets for another attack,” according to a Wall Street Journal report.
He’s also ignoring some key facts about the 1944 case.
After the submarine’s torpedoes struck the Peleus at about 7:30 p.m., March 13, 1944, according to Naval History, the ship sank in only three minutes, leaving no time to even launch lifeboats.
About a dozen survivors of the sunken freighter gathered in the area, “clinging to rafts and floating debris.”
Eck had one of the ship’s officers summoned aboard his U-boat for questioning, then released him back to his raft, assuring him “that Allied help would come the next day,” the magazine noted.
The U-boat then departed, only to stop about 1,000 yards away to begin an attack on the wreckage and rafts that were left of the Peleus — and the sailors who’d survived the sinking. Intermittently, for the next five hours, the Germans fired machine guns and lobbed hand grenades at the wreckage, Naval History reported.
The submarine finally left about 1 a.m. March 14.
Miraculously, four Peleus sailors lived through the ordeal. Three of them survived more than a month adrift and were eventually picked up by a Portuguese freighter, according to Naval History. News of the atrocity spread.
When U-boat 852 was attacked by the British Navy and run aground in May 1944 off the eastern coast of Africa, its log was captured. Between the written evidence and interviews with the U-boat’s crew, the British military knew it had the submarine that had sunk the Peleus, and the rest is history.
Moulton calls that “the exact same thing” as what happened in September? He apparently doesn’t know what “exact” means. Or what “same” means. And may even be foggy on “thing.”
There is literally no comparison between the actions of the U.S. military attacking narcoterrorists bent on continuing their mission and the five-hour, systematic slaughter of sailors at sea committed by the Nazi commander and his crew — a slaughter that occurred after the targeted men were given assurances that they would be left unharmed.
That was cold-blooded murder.
Now, it’s a good chance that Moulton had no idea of the real story about the executed war criminals he was talking about. It’s an even better chance that he didn’t care. After all, if leftists could learn from the lessons of history, they wouldn’t be leftists.
All he was trying to do was smear the Trump administration and its secretary of war by comparing it to one of the cruelest regimes in human history — and hinting there is a realistic case for literally executing one of its senior members.
What might be even more troubling was the reaction — or non-reaction — of CNN’s Burnett. As a look at the full video of the interview shows, she made no effort to challenge Moulton’s statement about Hegseth or even seem to consider it noteworthy at all.
In fact, she jumped right ahead to Trump’s relationship with NATO allies — which just gave Moulton a new angle of attack on the president.
Moulton’s problem — aside from being the kind of fool who’s too easily blindsided by his own ideology — is that he succumbed to the Democratic temptation to portray everything and anything associated with President Donald Trump as an incarnation of the Fourth Reich.
And he took the current Democratic fascination with assassination to a new level, with the implicit threat of execution for the Trump cabinet secretary in charge of the American military.
As implicit as it was, it was impossible not to understand.
And CNN treated it as if it didn’t matter at all.
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