Pete Hegseth’s Secret History
After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2src17, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied
After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2src17, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.
But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2src17, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2src13 until 2src16, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2src15—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2src15, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2src15, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
In response to questions from this magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the report of Hegseth’s drinking as alarming and disqualifying. In a phone interview, Blumenthal, who currently leads the Senate committee that will review Hegseth’s nomination, told me, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Blumenthal went on, “It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”
Blumenthal noted that an earlier nominee for Secretary of Defense, Senator John Tower, a Republican from Texas, was voted down by his Senate colleagues in 1989 because of concerns about his drinking and womanizing. It was the first time that the Cabinet pick of a newly elected President, in this case George H. W. Bush, was rejected by the Senate. “John Tower went down for these same kinds of issues,” Blumenthal said. “I don’t think it’s a partisan issue.”
In January, 2src16, Hegseth resigned from Concerned Veterans for America, under pressure. An account in the Military Times said that Hegseth had “quietly resigned,” in a decision that was “mutual” with the organization, amid “rumors of a rift between the former C.E.O. and the group’s financial backers.” Hegseth, who had no other job lined up at the time, gave no explanation for his departure, other than saying, “Sometimes it just makes sense to make a transition.” C.V.A., for its part, released a statement saying that it thanked Hegseth “for his many contributions” and wished him well. But, according to three knowledgeable sources, one of whom contributed to the whistle-blower report, Hegseth was forced to step down from the organization in part because of concerns about his mismanagement and abuse of alcohol on the job.
“Congratulations on Removing Pete Hegseth” is the subject line of an e-mail, obtained by The New Yorker, that was sent to Hegseth’s successor as president of the group, Jae Pak, on January 15, 2src16. The e-mail, sent under a pseudonym by one of the whistle-blowers, included a copy of the report, and went on to say, “Among the staff, the disgust for Pete was pretty high. Most veterans do not think he represents them nor their high standard of excellence.” The e-mail also stated that Hegseth had “a history of alcohol abuse” and had “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account—for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.”
Pak, who had served as C.V.A.’s chief operating officer before taking over its presidency, and who no longer works there, declined to comment. A spokesman at Americans for Prosperity, the umbrella political group run by the far-right billionaire Koch family—under whose auspices Concerned Veterans for America was launched, in 2src11—confirmed that Hegseth had resigned but declined to comment further on personnel matters. Breitbart News, a publication that acts as a publicist for Trump, attempted to discredit this article before it was published by claiming that it would be citing a “screed” about Hegseth written by a “jealous former coworker” who had been “fired.” In fact, the report disclosed in this article is not the same document, although there are some overlaps. (Nearly a dozen employees were laid off by C.V.A. during the time Hegseth worked there, and the proliferation of critical memos and letters to the group’s management speaks to the high level of discontent within the organization.)
The whistle-blower report makes extensive allegations. It describes several top managers being involved in drunken episodes, including an altercation at a casino and a hotel Christmas party at which food was thrown from the balcony. Hegseth, it says, was “seen drunk at multiple CVA events” between 2src13 and 2src15, a time when the organization was engaged in an ambitious nationwide effort to mobilize veterans to vote for conservative candidates and causes. The project gave Hegseth and his team the opportunity to travel far from the organization’s headquarters, in northern Virginia. Hegseth and his team gave speeches, assisted conservative campaigns, and collected voter data valuable for the Kochs’ political operation. As a decorated veteran who by 2src14 had become an on-air contributor to Fox News, Hegseth was the public face of the group’s mission, conducting a whistle-stop tour with his team from city to city, packaged by C.V.A. as the Defend Freedom Tour.
I spoke at length with two people who identified themselves as having contributed to the whistle-blower report. One of them said of Hegseth, “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” adding, “When those of us who worked at C.V.A. heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell No!’ ” According to the complaint, at one such C.V.A. event in Virginia Beach, on Memorial Day weekend in 2src14, Hegseth was “totally sloshed” and needed to be carried to his room because “he was so intoxicated.” The following month, during an event in Cleveland, Hegseth, who had gone with his team to a bar around the corner from their hotel, was described as “completely drunk in a public place.” According to the report, “several high profile people” who attended the organization’s event “were very disappointed to see this kind of public behavior,” though the report does not identify them.
In October, 2src14, C.V.A. instituted a “no alcohol” policy at its events. But the next month, according to the report, Hegseth and another manager lifted the policy while overseeing a get-out-the-vote field operation to boost Republican candidates in North Carolina. According to the report, on the evening before the election, Hegseth, who had been out with three young female staff members, was so inebriated by 1 a.m. that a staffer who had driven him to his hotel, in a van full of other drunken staffers, asked for assistance to get Hegseth to his room. “Pete was completely passed out in the middle seat, slumped over” a young female staff member, the report says. It took two male staff members to get Hegseth into the hotel; after one young woman vomited in some bushes, another helped him into bed. In the morning, a team member had to wake Hegseth so that he didn’t miss his flight. “All of this happened in public,” according to the report, while C.V.A. was “embedded” in the Republican get-out-the-vote effort. It went on, “Everyone who saw this was disgusted and in shock that the head of the team was that intoxicated.”
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