Top military brass have blasted Karoline Leavitt over what they say is an effort to scapegoat a special operations commander who followed orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to carry out what may well have amounted to a war crime.

“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls–t,” as one Pentagon official put it to the Washington Post. “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus,” another added.

Hegseth is under intense fire after the newspaper reported Friday he’d verbally authorized an elite military force to “kill everybody” on board an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean Sea.

After an initial strike, executed on Sept. 2, had left two survivors clinging to the remains of the vessel, Admiral Frank Bradley is understood to have ordered a second attack in compliance with Heg

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