Vice President JD Vance broke with his own administration's Pentagon chief on Friday, casting doubt on the plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Speaking to reporters at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in Hebron, Kentucky, before departing for a rally in Lima, Ohio, Vance said he doesn't "know that that's actually going to happen" — and that if it does, "I'm not going to be watching it."
Watch: CNN on Vance's remarks doubting the Pentagon's livestream plan for the Fort Hood shooter's execution.
The disagreement is over the broadcast, not the sentence. Vance went out of his way to say the controversy over the method should not eclipse what Hasan did. "Whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don't forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people," Vance said. He called the November 2009 attack — 13 people killed and 32 wounded at the Texas military base — "the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11."
The justice itself is not in question inside the administration. President Trump personally approved the firing squad on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's recommendation, and on Friday the president left no doubt about where he stands. "ABSOLUTELY I APPROVED!" Trump declared when asked whether he had personally authorized the execution. At a White House event, he said Hasan will get "the death penalty through firing squad, and he deserves it," calling the shooter a "maniac." For the victims' families, who have waited since 2009, the sentence is the accountability they have sought for seventeen years.
It was Hegseth who turned the execution into a public spectacle. In an interview Wednesday with Real America's Voice, the defense secretary announced the execution will be public and livestreamed, carried out by "soldiers with rifles." "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth said. "People need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things." Asked whether Hasan's lawyers had reached out to the administration, Hegseth answered: "Don't care. We'll see him on Dec. 3." A Pentagon official later confirmed to AFP: "It will be livestreamed. Details will follow."
The execution is set for December 3 at 1 p.m. CT at Fort Hood. It would be the first U.S. military execution in more than six decades — the last was the hanging of Pvt. John Bennett in 1961 — and the first military firing squad since World War II.
Vance's discomfort has roots beyond politics. He is a convert to the Catholic Church, which has long opposed capital punishment. On Friday morning, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, condemned the livestream decision, calling it a "barbaric promotion of a culture of death" that "must be reconsidered."
The criticism is bipartisan. Representative Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican, said he supports executing Hasan but drew the line at the broadcast: "livestreaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that." Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said Hasan should "face justice" but called public executions "the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do."
For now, the execution stands and the broadcast is an open question — one the vice president himself raised. The administration is delivering the sentence the families waited seventeen years for. Whether millions will watch it happen is something even the White House no longer seems sure about.