Politics
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December 4, 2024
The Fox News pundit—an alleged sexual assaulter with a drinking problem—has moved into Matt Gaetz territory.
Pete Hegseth hosts Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends All-American Summer Concert Series outside Fox News Channel Studios on May 31, 2019, in New York City.
(Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images)
The tabloid drama in the rogues’ gallery of prospective Trump cabinet appointments continues: Just over a week since Matt Gaetz’s wild downward ride from attorney-general designate to Cameo hustler, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, may be next down the funhouse slide.
Hegseth, a Fox News host, was one of Trump’s first “shock and awe” nominees to the president-elect’s incoming cabinet. He had quickly forfeited posts atop two veterans’ nonprofit groups amid charges of financial mismanagement, excessive drinking, and sexual misconduct, according to an investigation by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. From that inauspicious start in the military advocacy world, he landed his Fox gig, where he just as rapidly took up the same conduct, engineering a payoff and a nondisclosure agreement from a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her at a right-wing conference in California where Hegseth was a featured speaker. The police complaint over the incident makes for a bracing read.
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