Pete Hegseth Shouldn't Lead the Pentagon

Everyone knew about the allegations just published in The New Yorker

Pete Hegseth at a TPUSA event, via Gage Skidmore

Jane Mayer is the New Yorker reporter on the Koch beat, and she has a big story about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon. More or less all the material in it was known to Fox News, but there’s more she didn’t go into. Come on, Jane! You’ve got to hit them harder!

The line liberal publications have been taking is that Trump is running a loyalty-driven operation. If that were really true, guys like Jason Miller, who supported Ted Cruz in 2016, would be nowhere near him. Hegseth as well, during the 2016 campaign, was nothing but critical of Trump’s skepticism toward our post-9/11 wars.

He was discussed as a potential VA Secretary in 2018, during Trump’s first term, and was never put forward. There’s a reason for that, and if he wasn’t suitable for VA Secretary, there’s no way he can run the Pentagon.

Mayer’s piece goes into some of the fraternity culture in Concerned Veterans for America when Hegseth was running it.

It’s generally understood that Hegseth’s softest of softball interviews with Trump are how he got into the president’s good graces, but an inside connection is probably Marc Short, Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff, who was a big money guy in the Koch machine. It is also alleged that even before this Hegseth was close to Sheldon Adelson’s network, and helped arrange trips for various other veterans to Israel.

On Fox he was often identified as Major Hegseth when slamming Trump during his first term, which is not how it’s done for guardsmen, it’s an abuse of rank.

An incident in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio is mentioned, in which Hegseth is alleged to have chanted, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” An odd chant, to be sure, from someone who’s supposed to be on the restraint-oriented side of things. The staffer Mayer is likely getting this from also alleged Dave Bray of the band Madison Rising was doing the same.

In 2018 I reached out to Bray’s manager Becky Bray, who told me, “[Bray] absolutely denies that this incident happened. We are aware that these false allegations had been made in the past, but were investigated and found to be baseless. I would strongly advise that you verify your sources before publishing these false and defamatory allegations.”

Clearly if the New Yorker is publishing them, it needs another look. I asked her at the time by whom they were investigated, but she never got back to me.

When I was looking into this stuff back then, Herb London was involved in tut-tutting people who were raising concerns. He died later that year.

One of Hegseth’s close associates during this time was Justin Caporale, one-time director of operations for CVA who went on to be an aide to Melania Trump. There are some things about his time at CVA that would surely be of interest to the once and future First Lady. Caporale seems like a singularly nasty guy, who was involved in an incident at Arlington National Cemetery in September.