Hegseth Is Reportedly Vowing to Stop Drinking, Having His Mom Call Senators
Pete Hegseth’s quest to take over the Pentagon has been fraught — to say the least.
The former Fox News host has been struggling to weather a firestorm of scrutiny stemming from a series of damning revelations about his past since Donald Trump tapped him as his secretary of defense nominee last month.
Many of these revelations revolve around Hegseth’s drinking. There’s the disturbing 2017 sexual assault allegation, the police report for which included a hotel worker at the scene of the alleged incident saying Hegseth seemed very drunk. Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing and told police at the time that he was only “buzzed.” There’s also The New Yorker’s recent report about Hegseth’s time leading two veterans groups, during which he allegedly drank to the point that staffers at one of the groups found it embarrassing. He even once chanted “Kill all Muslims!” in a bar in a “drunk and violent manner,” according to an internal complaint.
A few days after that bombshell dropped, NBC News reported that Hegseth’s colleagues at Fox News, where he worked for over 10 years, harbored concerns about his drinking. On Wednesday, NPR reported that one of Hegseth’s former Fox colleagues said he was repeatedly “handsy” when intoxicated, and she alleged he groped her at a bar.
Hegseth has been on Capitol Hill this week trying to convince Republican senators that he’s still fit to lead the nation’s largest bureaucracy. It hasn’t been going great, with several senators expressing concern to reporters. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who on Monday defended Hegseth as a victim of the media throwing “disparaging remarks at someone who has earned a great deal of credibility,” changed her tune about the allegations a day later, saying they are something Hegseth “needs to address.”
He’s apparently been addressing them by promising senators he’ll stop drinking if they confirm him. He reportedly made the vow to Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). “I think that’s probably a good idea,” Wicker told reporters, per The Hill.
It’s unclear if promising to go cold turkey while taking on one of the most pressure-packed jobs in the nation will persuade Republicans to confirm him, but it does seem to be something they want from him. “I would love that. That would help. It would help me a lot,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told reporters on Wednesday.
Hegseth acknowledged his drinking earlier in the day in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “Like veterans returning from any war, we drank beers to manage the reality of what we had faced. But we never did anything improper, and we treated everyone with respect,” he wrote of his time leading the group Vets for Freedom. In an interview with Megyn Kelly later in the day, he claimed, “I never had a drinking problem.”
Hegseth has maintained that he has the full support of Trump and his team — despite the transition team being furious with him for not telling them about the 2017 sexual assault allegation, as Rolling Stone reported last month. He told reporters on Wednesday that he spoke in the morning with the president-elect, who told him to “keep fighting.”
Hegseth was scheduled to continue meeting with senators on Thursday, but reports emerged that he would instead be flying to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump, who is said to be considering withdrawing the nomination. When Hegseth was asked Wednesday afternoon whether he’d be flying to south Florida the next day, however, he replied, simply, “No.”
If it sounds like Hegseth’s nomination is in trouble, he reportedly told Republican lawmakers that his mother has been calling senators on his behalf — which will surely fix matters.
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