War Crimes & Misdemeanors, Part One: A Year-End Guide to Who’s Still on the Hook

December 2025
By Jenny Braddock, Politics Editor, Reluctantly

This is not a verdict, and it is not a prophecy, even though it may read like one to people who have confused the passage of time with exoneration. It is an accounting.

As 2025 closes, the Trump era has settled into its final defensive posture: loud claims of persecution, selective pardons, and the insistence that endurance alone should count as innocence. It doesn’t. What remains instead is a ledger of conduct, exposure, and consequences that never quite resolved, some of which are criminal, some civil, and others lodged permanently in professional disgrace or reputational damage that no court needs to certify. A few of these matters may never harden into charges at all, but they linger anyway, like smoke that never quite leaves the fabric.

This is Part One of that ledger, and it will be updated, because exposure is not the same thing as guilt, but it is also very much not nothing.

When “War Crimes” Stops Being a Metaphor

In late 2025, U.S. forces struck a small boat in international waters, reportedly targeting suspected militants. The vessel was not a military ship, and its status as a lawful target was questionable enough from the outset to make any competent military lawyer start rubbing their temples before the briefing was even over.

The strike did not occur in isolation. It followed a broader series of aggressive maritime operations across the Caribbean and the Pacific, many of which featured the same ingredients: ambiguous targets, rapid escalation, thin public explanations, and a growing sense that restraint had become optional. Several of those operations raised serious legal questions on their own. This one, however, crossed a different line.

Survivors of the initial strike were hit again — a confirmed double-tap strike — meaning a second attack on people who had already survived the first. Not a misidentification, not confusion in the fog of war, but a follow-up. This is the point at which the law stops being philosophical, because even if someone is inclined to argue about the legality of the first strike — and that argument already requires some creative effort — the second removes most of the ambiguity. Once people are wounded, shipwrecked, or otherwise out of the fight, they are no longer lawful targets.

This is not a novel legal question, nor is it one the world is still workshopping. After World War II, Japanese officers were prosecuted — and in some cases executed — for killing shipwrecked sailors, because the principle was considered settled even then: once someone is hors de combat, you do not get to finish the job. Not then, not now, and not ever.

Under the laws of armed conflict — the same ones the United States helped write, teach, and enforce on everyone else — deliberately attacking survivors is not a gray area or a close call. It is a textbook example, complete with manuals, training slides, and generations of military lawyers who already know exactly where the line is and why it exists.

According to reporting by the Washington Post, Pete Hegseth was attributed with the statement, “Kill everyone.” The significance of that line is not that war has never produced ugly language — it has always been full of it — but that it clarifies posture. It tells you how seriously concepts like proportionality, restraint, and command responsibility were being taken in that moment, which is to say: not very.

It also carries another consequence that somehow still needs explaining. When the United States signals that survivors are fair game, even once, it does more than test the outer boundaries of international law; it puts American service members at risk by advertising a rule set to adversaries who are more than happy to reciprocate. If wounded enemies are treated as legitimate targets, wounded Americans should expect no better.

It was around this point that Admiral Alvin Holsey, the four-star commander of U.S. Southern Command, retired early, stepping away from a post that normally lasts three to four years amid growing controversy over the very strikes that were now raising alarms inside and outside the Pentagon. Holsey did not accuse anyone on his way out, nor did he need to. He spoke instead about democracy and the rule of law — the sort of language senior officers use when they are trying to be polite about a disagreement they consider fundamental. Four-star commanders do not walk away mid-tour because everything is going great.

In a just world, or even a minimally functional one, this would be the point at which investigations begin, quietly and without theater, the kind where travel plans grow vague, passports feel heavier, and everyone involved suddenly remembers that international law exists whether they find it convenient or not. Whether that world ever materializes remains an open question, but the record itself already exists.

What “Being on the Hook” Actually Means

Not everyone tied to the Trump administration is in the same kind of trouble, and it helps to be explicit about what kind of exposure this ledger is tracking. Some figures face potential criminal liability, others face civil judgments that can and will be enforced, still others face professional consequences that permanently end careers, and a few may never be charged with anything at all, instead spending the rest of their lives explaining themselves at increasingly awkward dinners. This ledger tracks all of it.

Rudy Giuliani: Arithmetic, Not Ideology

Rudy Giuliani’s problem at this stage is no longer philosophical; it is arithmetic. Federal pardons, whether real or rumored, do not touch state-level exposure tied to fake-elector schemes and election interference, nor do they erase civil judgments, including the massive defamation verdict arising from lies told about election workers. They also do not stop asset seizure or enforcement, which tends to be where consequences become less abstract and more immediate.

Giuliani may never face prison, but he does not need to in order for the reckoning to have arrived. It is already being measured in dollars, licenses, and credibility he will never get back, which is often how accountability looks in practice when the criminal system chooses not to finish the job.

Mark Meadows: Close Enough to Get Burned

Mark Meadows’ exposure has always been a matter of proximity. As Trump’s chief of staff, he sat at the intersection of decisions, documents, and pressure campaigns, and his legal risk flows from testimony, record-keeping, and whether investigators ultimately conclude that lines were crossed between politics and obstruction. He has not been charged, but he has also not been cleared, and those two facts are far less interchangeable than his defenders would like them to be.

Sidney Powell: When the Courts Finally Notice

Sidney Powell’s downfall did not come from prosecutors so much as from judges getting tired. Sanctions, settlements, and formal judicial findings now sit on the record, establishing misconduct even in the absence of criminal convictions, as the law did what it often does in white-collar cases and moved sideways rather than forward. Powell may never see a jail cell, but her credibility already did, and it is not coming back.

Steve Bannon: Pardons Don’t Cover What Comes Next

Steve Bannon remains the living demonstration of how executive mercy actually works. Past convictions, contempt findings, and fraud-related exposure remain very much alive, because pardons are narrow instruments that do not pre-approve future behavior or erase patterns of conduct. Bannon’s real exposure now lives less in what he has already done than in what he keeps choosing to do next.

Ken Paxton: The State That Wouldn’t Finish the Job

Ken Paxton’s legal career has become a masterclass in delay, with securities-fraud allegations, impeachment findings, and election-related investigations producing an extensive factual record without a clean resolution. Avoiding removal did not erase the conduct; it merely postponed the reckoning, which is how some systems operate when punishment is politically inconvenient.

The Epstein Problem: Exposure That Never Closes

There is one form of exposure in this ledger that does not rely on prosecutors at all, and that is Jeffrey Epstein. This is not an allegation but a record, made up of photographs, interviews, flight logs, and documented associations that permanently contaminate claims of moral authority. Donald Trump’s past social proximity to Epstein, like Steve Bannon’s documented engagement with him after conviction, represents a stain that cannot be litigated away or memory-holed, and for a movement obsessed with moral panic, it remains the one association that cannot be scrubbed clean.

Some ledgers are legal; this one is reputational, and it never closes.

Beyond U.S. Borders

War crimes are not federal offenses in the ordinary sense, because they live in international law rather than domestic criminal codes. The United States’ relationship with international tribunals makes prosecution unlikely, but not impossible, and documentation persists regardless. Financial enforcement is far less forgiving, as securities law, money-laundering regimes, and crypto oversight operate across borders by default, with jurisdiction no longer stopping at the water’s edge and physical presence becoming optional while records remain stubbornly permanent.

Closing Entry

This is Part One, and some of the people listed here may eventually face charges, while others may encounter only civil judgments, professional ruin, or permanent reputational damage. A few may escape all of it except history, which has its own way of settling accounts. The point here is not vengeance so much as precedent, because power can buy an extraordinary amount of time, but it has never been particularly good at erasing records, no matter how loudly it insists otherwise.

Filed from: The end of the bad year. End of Part One.