Former Defense Secretary @MarkTEsper tells @kasie of Pete Hegseth: "It's one thing to have your political opponents attack you, but it's pretty damning when… a letter is uncovered where your mother is talking about your character and integrity and how you treat women." pic.twitter.com/zwuY0DcTRc
— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) December 2, 2024
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper: “It’s one thing to have your political opponents attack you, but it’s pretty damning when… a letter is uncovered where your mother is talking about your character and integrity and how you treat women.”
Over the weekend two bombshells hit the Pete Hegseth nomination for Defense Secretary. The first was that story in the NY Times revealing an email his mother sent to him a few years back castigating him for his grotesque treatment of his second wife and women in general. She has since repudiated it but admits that she sent it. And all the available evidence shows that she was absolutely right about her son’s lack of character and integrity. He’s a misogynist through and through.
Then last night The New Yorker dropped a story by Jane Mayer about Hegseth’s time running a couple of veteran’s groups, his only previous management experience. It’s not good. In fact, it’s very, very bad. Not only did he mismanage millions of dollars from the donors, he was a racist, abusive, drunk on the job and at many events in which was representing the group:
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, 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, 2015—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 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
Only the best people.
Trump is allegedly hostile to drunks so we’ll see. aybe Hegseth has gone through rehab and can claim that he’s reformed. But this should still be a disqualifier sionce he isn’t qualified in the first place. He’s an accused rapist, which this story would indicate is more than believable. And we know that he couldn’t run a 7-11 much less the largest employer in the country. His nomination is absurd on its face.
The fact that this man and his fellow Trumpers are on a literal crusade against “DEI” saying that it results in people being hired into jobs for which they are unqualified is just:
