Previously unseen reports and corroborating statements from witnesses to the New Yorker paint exactly the picture you already pretty much imagined about convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth during his time running two Koch-backed political operations, with one report from staffers at Concerned Veterans of America detailing how Pete was so shitfaced at more than one fundraiser event that he needed to be physically carried out, had to be dragged off the stage at a Louisiana strip joint in 2015, and systemically pursued sex with female staff members of the organization by dividing them into “party girls” and “not party girls.”
Oh and Hegseth screamed “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” in the early morning hours while in a bar during a work trip in Ohio. After Hegseth was canned in 2016, a staffer wrote in an email that the Fox News host had “a history of alcohol abuse” and “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.” The other, similarly astroturfed operation, Veterans For Freedom, was completely run into the ground by Hegseth, its coffers depleted to under a thousand dollars with $434,833 in debts and $75,000 in credit card bills in 2010.
And of course there’s more sexual harassment stuff in there, but this is about as much as we can summarize right now. At the end of the story there’s one other lie exposed however: MAGA lawyer Tim Parlatore told the New Yorker that, despite Hegseth having agreed to a confidential settlement with his rape accuser in 2020, the cops who investigated the 2017 incident dropped it because the woman had made a false accusation previously. Reporter Jane Mayer then followed up with the local DA’s office and, sur-fucking-prise, they responded promptly to say there was no evidence of that.