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Hegseth forced out of vets groups due to drinking, misconduct: New Yorker
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran due to mismanagement of funds, sexual impropriety and reports of intoxicated behavior, The New Yorker reported on Sunday.
The incidents — relayed in a trail of documents and corroborated to The New Yorker by the accounts of former colleagues — took place prior to Hegseth becoming a full-time Fox News TV host in 2017.
Hegseth’s reported booting from both Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America raises further questions about his suitability to take the helm as Defense secretary, a position in which he would oversee the country’s largest federal agency that employs more than 2.8 million people.
The publication cited a previously undisclosed whistleblower report on Hegseth’s time as the president of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). That seven-page report, which chronicled his 2013 to 2016 tenure, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity and sometimes needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.
The report had been created by multiple former CVA employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February 2015.
Among the most damning allegations, Hegseth was so intoxicated he had to be physically stopped from joining dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team in November 2014.
Two people who told The New Yorker they had contributed to the report said they had seen Hegseth drunk numerous times and on multiple occasions dragged away or carried from one location to another because he was so intoxicated.
“To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” one person said.
In one complaint in the report, describing a CVA event in Virginia Beach on Memorial Day weekend in 2014, Hegseth was seen as “totally sloshed” and had to be carried to his room because “he was so intoxicated.”
The next month at an event in Cleveland, Hegseth went with his team to a bar near their hotel and got “completely drunk in a public place,” with “several high profile people” who were in attendance “very disappointed to see this kind of public behavior,” according to the report.
The report also says that Hegseth — at the time married to his second wife — along with other members of his management team sexually pursued the CVA’s female staffers and created a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of sexual assault or harassment.
And in a separate letter of complaint sent to CVA in late 2015, another former employee said a drunk Hegseth was aggressively chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” at a Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, bar early on May 29, 2015, while on official business in the state.
Timothy Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told The New Yorker that “an advisor” to Hegseth was not “going to comment on outlandish claims” laundered through the publication “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.”
But Senate Armed Services Committee senior member Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told The New Yorker the reports of Hegseth’s drinking were alarming and disqualifying to him becoming Pentagon chief.
“Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure,” he said. “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.”
Hegseth also reportedly drove the organization Vets for Freedom (VFF) into the ground financially.
In 2007, he became president of the group, which advocated for expanding the war in Iraq and was funded by several Republican billionaire donors. But under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization ran up enormous debt with money reportedly being wasted on expenses such as parties.
The finances of VFF became so bleak the group’s donors arranged for VFF to merge with another organization that would take over most of its management, essentially forcing Hegseth out in 2012.
The bombshell report follows a recently unearthed email sent by Hegseth’s mother, Penelope Hegseth, in 2018, in which she admonishes him as “an abuser of women” who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.”
“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote to her son, according to text of the email published by The New York Times.
Penelope Hegseth told the Times she had sent a follow-up message at the time apologizing for the email, claiming she sent the message “in anger, with emotion” as her son and his wife were going through a divorce.
Hegseth has come under significant fire over allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017, with a police report on the incident that surfaced last month. He denies the claims of wrongdoing, but his lawyer has admitted Hegseth paid the woman to avoid a lawsuit.
Trump’s pick of Hegseth to serve as the Pentagon’s top civilian had already shocked many in Washington, given his job as a former Fox News commentator and his limited experience in running an organization.
Hegseth was also in the Army National Guard during the time he was running conservative veterans groups.
He was an infantry officer in the Army National Guard from 2002 to 2021. After graduating from Princeton University in 2003, he went on to serve tours in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, earning two Bronze Stars along with other service medals.
Read more at The Hill
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