A May 27, 2026, essay published on the law and security site Just Security is gaining renewed attention, as it outlines a multi-year strategy for foreign governments to assemble criminal cases against sitting U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and two senior military commanders.
The piece, titled “International Accountability for U.S. Crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific,” was written by Tracey Begley, Benjamin R. Farley, and Sarah Harrison.
Harrison served as counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration from 2015 to 2017 and later as a Pentagon associate general counsel advising on the law governing U.S. military activities. Farley spent 13 years in government service, including as an adviser to the State Department’s Guantanamo closure envoy and director of its Office of Terrorist Detentions before returning to the department under the Biden Administration. Begley previously worked as a senior adviser in the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice.
The essay identifies three individuals as “high-level potential perpetrators”: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Admiral Frank Bradley (commander of U.S. Special Operations Command), and General Francis Donovan (commander of U.S. Southern Command). It describes U.S. strikes on drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific as “unjustified summary executions—murder” and states that the campaign has killed “at least 193 people across 57 incidents.”
The authors write that the killings “may even constitute crimes against humanity.”
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It goes on to instruct foreign governments to collect “evidence” that can be used by Democrats should they regain power in Congress, which they now have. “Officials in Colombia, Ecuador, or other affected States 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,” the piece continues.
It notes that crimes of murder and attempted murder “typically carry no or very lengthy statutes of limitation, such as 20 or 30 years,” and that foreign domestic courts “have the benefit of time.” The authors further state that even if custody cannot be obtained, the existence of warrants could produce “self-imposed travel restrictions to avoid arrest, along with public condemnation.”
The piece observes that the Trump administration has publicly identified the three named officials and that the United States has repatriated survivors of some strikes, which the authors say “may be able to provide critical testimony.” It acknowledges “obvious geopolitical downsides” for countries such as Colombia and Ecuador in pursuing cases while noting that those states “already have laws that would allow for prosecution of crimes like murder or attempted murder.”
The May 27 essay is one of several Just Security pieces published in 2026 by former Obama and Biden administration lawyers that examine avenues for accountability related to the same operations. A November 10 piece by Tess Bridgeman (an Obama White House lawyer and deputy National Security Council legal adviser) and Ryan Goodman (who served as special counsel to the Pentagon’s general counsel in 2015–2016) discusses domestic mechanisms, including the use of pardons and subsequent testimony requirements, and states that “bureaucratic task forces are often where accountability efforts are sent to die.”
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[ H/T Trending Politics ]
