Vance on Hegseth plan for livestreamed execution: ‘I’m not going to be watching it’

Vice President Vance said Friday that he will not be watching the execution of Nidal Hasan if the Pentagon follows through on livestreaming the event in December.

“I’ve seen those announcements. I don’t know if that’s actually going to happen,” Vance told reporters Friday in Lima, Ohio.

“This is a guy who committed, in my view, the worst terrorist attack on American soil outside of 9/11,” he continued. “The people that he was meant to treat, the army soldiers he was meant to treat for mental illness and other problems, he took them at their most vulnerable, and gunned down these people where they lived.”

“So 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,” he said. “Now that said, if it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that the public would be able to watch Hasan’s execution by firing squad.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said in an interview with the conservative outlet Real America’s Voice.

The announcement sparked immediate bipartisan backlash.

“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) said in a post on social platform X.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called the move “disgusting” during an interview on CNN.

“What is he, mimicking ISIS executions?” Murphy said.