Rep. Yassamin Ansari has escalated her campaign against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from a demand for removal to an explicit call for criminal prosecution.

In a video posted after the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, the Arizona Democrat called Hegseth one of the most incompetent and corrupt officials in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, accused him of damaging the military and said he should not only be impeached but “tried for the crimes” she says he has committed in Iran, the Caribbean and elsewhere.

The language is real.

The criminal conclusion is not yet established.

That distinction is the central issue in evaluating the latest confrontation.

Ansari is not simply criticizing Hegseth’s management.

She is accusing a sitting Cabinet secretary of conduct serious enough to justify both constitutional removal and criminal accountability.

But impeachment and prosecution are two different legal processes, with different standards of proof.

And although several episodes involving Hegseth now carry serious factual and legal questions, there is no federal indictment accusing him of war crimes, murder or any other criminal offense arising from the current Iran conflict or the U.S. military’s campaign against suspected drug-trafficking vessels.

The strongest version of Ansari’s case is therefore not that Hegseth has already been proved guilty.

It is that Congress and independent investigators have substantial unresolved conduct to examine.

That case began months before the latest video.

On April 15, 2026, Ansari formally introduced H. Res. 1177, a six-article impeachment resolution against Hegseth.

The resolution was referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

Its public legislative record still lists April 15 as the latest formal action.

So Ansari did not suddenly file a new impeachment case this week.

Her latest comments are a renewed push built on allegations she already placed before Congress in the spring.

The six articles are broad.

They accuse Hegseth of participating in an unauthorized war against Iran and recklessly endangering U.S. service members.

They accuse him of violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting civilians.

They cite his handling of sensitive military information.

They accuse him of obstructing congressional oversight.

They allege abuse of power and politicization of the armed forces.

And they accuse him of conduct bringing disrepute on the United States and its military.

Those are accusations in a House resolution.

They are not findings of guilt.

The House has not adopted the articles.

The Senate has not tried Hegseth.

No criminal court has convicted him of the conduct Ansari describes.

That legal status matters even when some of the underlying controversies are well documented.

The immediate political trigger for Ansari’s newest video was the departure of Dan Driscoll.

Driscoll submitted his resignation as Army secretary on August 31 after roughly 18 months in the job.

Major news organizations reported months of friction between Driscoll and Hegseth.

The disputes involved senior personnel decisions, officer promotions, modernization priorities and Hegseth’s removal of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

Driscoll had close ties to Vice President JD Vance and had become a prominent advocate of faster weapons acquisition, drones and Army modernization.

His resignation therefore intensified an already serious debate about leadership turnover at the Pentagon.

But one part of the viral framing goes too far.

Driscoll did not publicly say he resigned because he refused to continue working for Hegseth.

In fact, his farewell message said almost the opposite in tone.

Driscoll called his time as Army secretary “the honor of a lifetime” and said the Army “could not have made the progress we did without the support of Secretary Hegseth.”

That does not erase credible reporting about tension between the two men.

A public farewell statement can be diplomatic.

It does mean that the claim that Driscoll openly chose resignation rather than serve under Hegseth is not established by Driscoll’s own words.

The more defensible account is narrower.

Driscoll resigned after months of reported friction with Hegseth, but he gave no public reason for leaving and publicly thanked the defense secretary on his way out.

The same caution applies to the claim that the Army has nobody in charge.

That was closer to the institutional reality immediately after the resignation, but it is now outdated as a literal statement.

On September 3, Trump named Adam Telle acting Army secretary.

Gen. Christopher LaNeve has been performing the duties of the Army’s top uniformed officer since Hegseth removed Gen. Randy George earlier this year.

The Army therefore has leaders.

What it does not currently have is Senate-confirmed permanent leadership in both of its top civilian and uniformed positions.

That is still a significant problem at a time when the United States is engaged in a prolonged conflict with Iran and facing major demands on weapons production, force readiness and modernization.

It is simply different from saying nobody is running the service.

Ansari’s criticism of Hegseth’s résumé also mixes political judgment with fact.

Hegseth came to the Pentagon after years as a Fox News personality and without prior experience managing an organization comparable to the Defense Department.

That lack of senior executive and Pentagon-management experience was a major issue during his confirmation.

But “zero qualifications” is rhetoric.

Hegseth served as an Army National Guard infantry officer, deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan and later led a veterans advocacy organization.

Whether that background was enough preparation to manage the world’s most powerful military is a legitimate political question.

It is not accurate to erase the background entirely.

The larger leadership-turnover argument has stronger factual support.

Since taking office, Hegseth has removed, forced out or blocked the advancement of numerous senior military leaders.

The changes have included top Army and Navy officials and other senior general and flag officers.

Critics describe the pattern as an ideological purge.

The administration describes it as accountability and a deliberate effort to change a military bureaucracy it believes became too politicized and too focused on diversity programs instead of warfighting.

The public record supports describing the turnover as unusually aggressive.

It supports asking whether politics and loyalty are influencing military personnel decisions.

It does not prove that every officer who left was removed solely to make room for a partisan loyalist.

Individual cases have different circumstances.

That distinction becomes even more important when Ansari moves from management criticism to alleged crimes.

Her most serious accusations involve Iran.

The United States and Israel began major military operations against Iran on February 28, 2026.

Congress has not passed a specific authorization for use of military force covering the current Iran campaign.

That fact is important.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, while presidents have long claimed substantial Article II authority to use military force without a formal declaration in certain circumstances.

The War Powers Resolution attempts to regulate that relationship.

Successive administrations of both parties have disputed how far congressional limits can constrain presidential military power.

The Trump administration argues that the president had constitutional authority to use force against Iran to protect the United States, American forces and national interests from what it described as imminent threats involving Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities and threats to U.S. personnel and regional shipping.

Critics say sustained hostilities lasting months go far beyond the limited defensive authority presidents may exercise without Congress.

Ansari calls the war illegal.

That is a serious constitutional position.

It is not a final judicial holding.

The more precise factual statement is that the war does not have a specific congressional authorization and that its legality under Article II and the War Powers framework remains deeply contested.

One incident inside that conflict gives Ansari’s accountability argument particular force.

On February 28, a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran.

The school was next to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound.

Independent investigations by the Associated Press and Amnesty International have produced strong evidence that a U.S. munition struck the school.

The casualty toll has varied among investigations and official accounts.

Recent AP reporting has placed the death toll at at least 168 people, most of them children.

Amnesty International documented 156 deaths, including 120 children, in its earlier investigation.

The precise count has continued to evolve.

What does not appear seriously disputable is the scale of the tragedy.

A school full of children was hit during the opening hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign.

More than 100 children died.

Evidence points strongly toward a U.S. strike.

And the Pentagon has not publicly released the full results of its investigation.

Amnesty concluded that the United States failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm and called the strike unlawful.

The group said the circumstances must be investigated for possible war crimes.

That is a grave finding.

It is still different from proving that Hegseth personally committed a war crime.

International humanitarian law distinguishes between a military failure, an unlawful attack and an individually prosecutable war crime.

A criminal case would require evidence about the intended target, the intelligence available before the strike, what decision-makers knew, what precautions were feasible and the mental state required by the relevant offense.

If outdated targeting information caused planners to believe the school was still part of a military complex, that could indicate a catastrophic targeting failure.

If officials knew it was a functioning school and attacked anyway without lawful justification, the legal analysis would be very different.

The public still does not have the complete Pentagon targeting record.

That is why the Minab strike strongly supports demands for transparency and investigation while stopping short of proving Ansari’s criminal accusation against Hegseth personally.

The same problem appears in the U.S. military’s boat-strike campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

The campaign began in September 2025.

By late August 2026, the military had carried out at least 68 strikes and killed at least 227 people.

U.S. Southern Command says the targeted vessels were involved in narcotics trafficking and describes those aboard as “narco-terrorists.”

In many cases, however, the government has not publicly released evidence identifying the people killed or showing the drugs allegedly carried by each vessel.

Journalists and rights groups have produced cases in which the government’s descriptions have been challenged.

That secrecy has created a fundamental legal dispute.

Ordinary drug trafficking is generally a law-enforcement problem.

Suspects are normally interdicted, arrested and prosecuted.

The administration has instead asserted that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with designated cartel organizations and that certain members of those organizations may therefore be targeted with military force.

The government’s most important legal analysis supporting that theory remains classified.

Critics, including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, international-law specialists and some members of Congress, reject the armed-conflict theory and characterize the strikes as unlawful killings.

Those critics may eventually prove correct.

But the viral claim that all 227 people killed have been established as innocent civilians is stronger than the public evidence.

The most carefully supported number is 227 people killed in 68 strikes.

The government says they were cartel-linked targets.

Rights groups and journalists say evidence in at least some cases casts serious doubt on that description.

That disagreement is precisely why public evidence and legal review matter.

The first boat strike also presents one of the campaign’s hardest questions.

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military attacked a suspected drug vessel.

Two people survived the initial blast and were seen clinging to wreckage.

A second strike killed them.

Members of Congress later viewed classified footage of the incident.

Democrats who watched it expressed deep concern.

Republicans who defended the operation said the survivors remained lawful targets and may have been attempting to recover contraband.

The full video remains classified.

Legal experts have noted that people who are shipwrecked or otherwise hors de combat can be protected from attack under the law of armed conflict if they no longer pose a lawful military threat.

That makes the second strike a legitimate subject for investigation.

It does not automatically establish murder by Hegseth.

The public would need to know what orders he gave, what the commander on scene understood, what the survivors were doing, whether the armed-conflict framework was lawful in the first place and what targeting rules governed the strike.

Ansari’s accusation jumps from unresolved evidence to a criminal conclusion.

That is politically forceful.

It is legally unfinished.

Her impeachment case has another component that is much more firmly documented: Hegseth’s use of Signal.

The Pentagon inspector general released a report in December 2025 examining Hegseth’s use of a personal phone and the commercial messaging application to discuss planned U.S. strikes on Houthi forces in Yemen.

The watchdog found that he transmitted sensitive, nonpublic operational information through an unapproved system.

The report said his actions “created a risk to operational security” that could have resulted in failed mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.

The inspector general also found that Hegseth, as the department’s original classification authority, had authority to declassify Defense Department information.

That complicated claims that he necessarily transmitted classified information illegally.

But the report was not the “total exoneration” Hegseth described.

The watchdog concluded that his communication practices violated department rules and created real operational risk.

That is a documented institutional finding.

It still did not charge him with a crime.

The distinction between impeachment and prosecution therefore becomes crucial.

The Constitution allows the House to impeach civil officers for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

That phrase has historically covered serious abuses of office that do not necessarily correspond to a criminal code section.

A simple majority of the House can approve articles of impeachment.

The Senate then conducts a trial.

Removal requires conviction by two-thirds of senators present.

Criminal prosecution works differently.

A prosecutor must identify an actual offense.

For alleged war crimes, one relevant federal law is the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2441.

The statute provides federal criminal penalties for defined war crimes when its jurisdictional conditions are met.

But the statute does not convert every unlawful military operation, civilian casualty or disputed presidential war into automatic criminal liability for the defense secretary.

Prosecutors would have to prove the elements of a specific offense.

They would have to establish a legally sufficient basis for Hegseth’s personal responsibility.

They would have to prove the required mental state.

And they would ultimately have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

No public indictment does that today.

No court judgment does it.

No congressional impeachment resolution does it.

That does not mean prosecution is impossible.

It means Ansari’s demand is a demand for an investigation and eventual criminal process, not a statement of an already adjudicated fact.

The distinction protects the credibility of the allegations themselves.

There is enough documented controversy around Hegseth that critics do not need to overstate what has been proven.

His Signal conduct was faulted by the Pentagon’s own inspector general.

The Minab school strike killed an extraordinary number of children and remains insufficiently explained.

The boat-strike campaign has killed at least 227 people under a legal theory the administration has not fully disclosed to the public.

The September 2025 follow-up strike on survivors has generated serious law-of-war questions.

The Iran campaign lacks a specific congressional authorization.

The Pentagon has experienced unusually high senior-leadership turnover.

And Dan Driscoll’s departure adds another major resignation to that record.

Those facts justify scrutiny.

They do not establish every conclusion in Ansari’s video.

Driscoll did not publicly say he quit rather than work for Hegseth.

The Army is not literally leaderless.

Hegseth did not enter office with “zero” relevant experience.

Calling every removed officer a victim of a proven MAGA loyalty purge goes beyond what is established in each case.

Calling the Iran war definitively criminal is a legal conclusion that has not been resolved by a court.

Calling all 227 people killed at sea proven innocent civilians overstates the available evidence.

And saying Hegseth has committed prosecutable war crimes requires evidence about personal responsibility and criminal intent that the public record does not yet supply.

That leaves Ansari’s impeachment effort in a politically unusual position.

Some of her rhetoric is clearly overstated.

Some of the underlying conduct is genuinely serious.

H. Res. 1177 remains in the House Judiciary Committee.

It has not been adopted.

The latest video does not change its legislative status.

What it changes is the level of accusation.

Ansari is no longer merely saying Hegseth is unfit for office.

She is saying the conduct should eventually be tested in a criminal court.

Whether that happens will depend on evidence that has not yet been made public.

The Pentagon’s investigations matter.

The classified legal basis for the boat strikes matters.

The targeting record from Minab matters.

The chain of command for the September 2025 second strike matters.

The communications and orders connecting Hegseth personally to individual operations matter.

Without those pieces, the public can judge his leadership and Congress can debate impeachment.

A criminal court would need more.

That is the real meaning of the “tried for his crimes” clash.

Ansari has made the accusation.

She has formally placed impeachment articles before Congress.

Several underlying events deserve aggressive investigation.

But impeachment is not conviction.

An allegation of a war crime is not proof of a war crime.

And a demand that Pete Hegseth be prosecuted is not the same thing as a case that prosecutors have already proved.

The next stage of this fight should therefore be about evidence.

Not whether Ansari is allowed to make the accusation.

She is.

Not whether Hegseth’s record contains serious controversies.

It does.

The unanswered question is whether investigators can connect any specific act to a criminal offense and to Hegseth personally strongly enough to survive the standard of a court.