Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense was forced out of two veterans' non-profit organizations he lead for repeated public drunken behavior, sexist behavior, and financial mismanagement, according to corroborations of former colleagues and a trail of documents.
Before becoming a Fox News host, Pete Hegseth ran two nonprofit veterans advocacy groups, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
A whistleblower report from Hegseth’s time with Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 to 2016, described him as being repeatedly intoxicated in public, needing to be carried out of events. The seven-page report was sent to senior management of the organization in February of 2015.
- The report detailed that Hegseth had to be restrained from joining strippers on stage at a Louisiana strip club.
- Hegseth, who was married at the time, was also reported to have sexually pursued female staffers of the CVA, along with other members, who divided women into groups of “party girls” and “not party girls.”
- A separate letter complained that in 2015, Hegseth was drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” while in a bar on tour in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.
Hegseth signed up for the Army R.O.T.C. in 2001 while attending Princeton, where he majored in politics. While at Princeton he published a conservative journal that mocked liberalism on campus. This included mocking a commenter who claimed that sex with an unconscious woman constituted rape. Hegseth claimed that rape required both a failure to consent and “duress,” which a passed-out woman couldn’t experience.
- In 2004 he served in Guantanamo Bay, guarding detainees for a year. Upon return he volunteered to serve in Iraq. Afterward he moved to New York, where he struggled, and drank a lot trying to process what he had been through. He met a marine who was working for a small nonprofit organization called Vets for Freedom, which was backed by Republican billionaires. By 2007, Hegseth had become the VFF leader.
- Under Hegseth’s leadership, the VFF ran up enormous debt, and by the end of 2008, the organization was unable to pay its creditors. Big donors were hearing of parties “that could politely be called trysts,” and rumors of “money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.”
- The donors hired an audit, which showed the group had less than a thousand dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills.
Complete report at The New Yorker
Also, Forbes, The Guardian, MSNBC
