Pete Hegseth paid off a sexual assault accuser

Sometimes it’s who you most etc.:

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to astatement from his lawyer Saturday and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident, and maintained that police who were contacted a few days after the encounter by the woman concluded that “the Complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.”Police have not confirmed that assertion.

Hegseth agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox,” where he works as a host, the statement said.

I would say Hegseth’s lawyers have a much higher opinion of Fox News than I do.

In addition to what he is credibly accused of, your reminder that Hegseth definitely favors pardoning particularly appalling war criminals:

During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for the pardons of Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and pushed to support Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom were facing charges or convictions related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth’s advocacy on behalf of the three service members appeared to pay off: in Nov. 2019, Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, citing Hegseth and Fox News when he tweeted about his decision to review one of the cases.

Hegseth’s vocal defense of these men as victims of overzealous prosecution raised eyebrows in the military community, where such interventions by civilians are seen by some as a threat to the integrity of the justice system. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends in May 2019. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.”

Lorance had been convicted by a military court in 2013 for the murder of two Afghan men during a military operation in 2012 in which he ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of unarmed Afghan civilians he suspected of being insurgents. Lorance served six years of a 19-year sentence before Trump, after lobbying from Hegseth and others, granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019, arguing that he was unfairly targeted by military prosecutors and that his actions were justified in a combat environment where split-second decisions were often necessary for survival.

Golsteyn, a former Green Beret, was accused of murdering an unarmed Afghan man in 2010, a suspect he believed was responsible for killing U.S. troops. Although Golsteyn had been awarded the Silver Star for his actions in Afghanistan, he later admitted to killing the suspect during a CIA interview, which prompted an investigation and the eventual charges against him. Trump granted him a pardon in Nov. 2019 after Hegseth interviewed Golsteyn on his show.

Gallagher was charged by the Navy with multiple crimes, including shooting civilians in Iraq, using a knife to kill a teenage Islamic State prisoner in Iraq in 2017, and threatening to kill fellow SEALs if they reported him. Gallagher was acquitted of murder by a military jury but convicted on one count of posing for photographs with the deceased body. His rank was reduced by one step as punishment. Trump reversed Gallagher’s demotion, restoring his rank and benefits.

Since we’re dealing with the Republican Party in 2024, the extensive evidence that Hegseth is a moral degenerate in addition to being entirely unqualified to be Secretary of Defense is presumably a positive factor for his likelihood of being confirmed.