A group of former Obama and Biden administration lawyers published an essay this past May instructing foreign governments to secretly build criminal cases against sitting U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and two senior military commanders, then sit on those cases until Donald Trump is out of the White House. Nothing suspicious about that at all.
The piece, titled “International Accountability for U.S. Crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific,” was posted on the law and security site Just Security on May 27, 2026. It was written by Tracey Begley, Benjamin R. Farley, and Sarah Harrison. Harrison served as counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama from 2015 to 2017 and later as a Pentagon associate general counsel. Farley spent 13 years in government, including advising the State Department’s Guantanamo closure envoy and running its Office of Terrorist Detentions, before returning under Biden. Begley was a senior adviser in the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice. So basically, the dream team of people who think foreign courts should run U.S. foreign policy.
The essay labels Hegseth, Admiral Frank Bradley of U.S. Special Operations Command, and General Francis Donovan of U.S. Southern Command as “high-level potential perpetrators.” It describes U.S. strikes on drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific as “unjustified summary executions, murder,” claiming the campaign has killed “at least 193 people across 57 incidents.” The authors go further, writing that the killings “may even constitute crimes against humanity.” That’s a bold charge to level while apparently rooting for the cartels to get a court win.
The really jaw-dropping part is the explicit game plan they lay out for foreign governments. Pete Hegseth foreign indictment strategy 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 essay reads. They’re not hiding it. They literally wrote it down and published it.
To make sure nobody slips through on a technicality, the authors helpfully remind foreign governments that murder charges “typically carry no or very lengthy statutes of limitation, such as 20 or 30 years.” They add that even if Hegseth or the commanders can’t be physically arrested, the mere existence of foreign warrants could produce “self-imposed travel restrictions to avoid arrest, along with public condemnation.” The goal, to be crystal clear, is to make life as difficult as possible for Trump administration officials using whatever foreign leverage is available.
This isn’t a one-off either. A November 10 piece on the same site 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 and 2016, discusses domestic accountability mechanisms. That piece bluntly warns that “bureaucratic task forces are often where accountability efforts are sent to die.” Good to know they’ve got the full playbook covered.
So where does this go from here? The essays are already circulating widely, and you can bet congressional Democrats will find a way to reference them. The Trump administration has publicly identified all three named officials, and the authors note that the U.S. has repatriated survivors of some strikes who “may be able to provide critical testimony.” These former officials are playing a long game, banking on a future Democratic administration to pick up where foreign courts leave off. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth keeps doing his job, which is apparently the most unforgivable thing a cabinet secretary can do.
