The lack of rigor in the Hegseth investigation is reminiscent of the F.B.I.’s investigation into Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious confirmation hearing, in 2018. Three years after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the F.B.I. disclosed that it had received more than forty-five hundred tips on him during its investigation, and that the Trump White House determined which ones received follow-up. (Max Stier, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who had reached out to the Bureau to report witnessing gross misconduct by Kavanaugh, was among those the F.B.I. never contacted.) The Bureau has a lesser standard for background checks of nominees than it does for criminal investigations. It regards the President who appointed the nominee—in both these instances, Trump—as “the client” who determines the scope of the inquiry.
The F.B.I.’s Hegseth report may be irrelevant, in any case, because it appears that most senators will never even get to see it. The newly installed Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, who was briefed on the F.B.I.’s investigation into Hegseth last Friday, plans not to share the Bureau’s findings with any senator other than the top-ranking Democrat on the committee, Jack Reed, of Rhode Island. A senior Republican staffer on the Armed Services Committee told me that the close hold on the F.B.I. findings was normal practice. But Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate are outraged by the decision. In a text, Blumenthal told me that the Trump team was trying to “conceal” and “whitewash” Hegseth’s past, adding, “Whatever they say is ‘normal’ (a disputed point), this nomination is not normal.”
The amount of private money being spent on the effort to confirm Hegseth is staggering for a Cabinet nominee. The sum is rivalled only by the cash that has been spent to pressure senators into confirming Supreme Court Justices. This week, one group, American Leadership PAC, reportedly plans to spend a million dollars to muscle wavering Republican senators in five states into approving Hegseth. According to the most recent F.E.C. records, the group barely exists, other than as a political piggy bank for four enormously wealthy right-wing megadonors. Federal records show that, in the 2022 and 2024 political cycles, the group was funded almost entirely by the Texas oil magnate Timothy Dunn; Thomas Klingenstein, a New York financier who runs the conservative Claremont Institute; Bill Koch, a member of the oil-and-gas dynasty and the founder of the petroleum-coke business Oxbow Carbon, L.L.C.; and the Wisconsin billionaire Richard Uihlein, the chair of the Uline packing company.
In December, a dark-money group previously backed by Elon Musk, Building America’s Future, also began pouring money into the fight. It spent half a million dollars on ads pressuring Ernst to support Hegseth after she voiced doubts about him. Musk and other Trump allies have made clear that they will fund primary challenges against Republican senators who oppose Trump’s nominees. (According to Fox News, several of Trump’s top campaign operatives—including his campaign manager Chris LaCivita and the pollster Tony Fabrizio—are set to become senior advisers to the dark-money group, which they plan to use as a private funder of Trump’s second-term agenda.)
“Elon Musk’s actions are designed to subvert the constitutional responsibility of the U.S. Senate to advise and consent,” Warren told me in a phone interview. Last week, after Hegseth declined to meet with Warren before the hearing, she sent him a thirty-three-page letter demanding answers. “He couldn’t pass a background check for a job at the mall,” she said. “He’s the most unqualified nominee for Secretary of Defense in U.S. history.” Warren argued that Hegseth’s previous opposition to female soldiers, in addition to the allegations of sexual assault, make him “an insult to women.” Moreover, she added, “he’s been repeatedly drunk at work events. Even his Fox co-workers talked about having to babysit him.”
Outside the public eye, Hegseth’s fixers have used questionable tactics against his opponents. Last week, the private employment records of a former employee of Hegseth’s who was a potential witness against him were leaked to the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site, which published them in an apparent effort to undermine her. The Free Beacon’s chief financial supporter is Paul Singer, a New York hedge-fund billionaire who was also a major supporter of Vets for Freedom, a nonprofit that nearly went bankrupt under Hegseth in 2008, as NBC recently reported. The Free Beacon didn’t disclose its past ties to Hegseth. Instead, it publicly outed the previously anonymous witness, who had sought whistle-blower protection from the Senate Armed Services Committee. The same day, another version of the piece about the witness, along with her photograph, appeared in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post.
The whistle-blower, Kat Dugan, is a military veteran who helped compile the accounts of Hegseth’s drinking, misogyny, and other misconduct for the report on Hegseth produced by several former employees at Concerned Veterans for America. The seven-page report was written by numerous former employees and named more than two dozen individuals and incidents. But the Free Beacon and Post stories attempted to dismiss Dugan as a lone “disgruntled employee” exacting revenge for having been laid off following a medical leave.
When asked for comment, Dugan sent a statement via e-mail decrying “thuggish efforts to intimidate me.” She said that Hegseth’s allies had spread “outright lies” about her, including the false claim that she was trying to help the Democrats. She described herself as a registered Republican with twenty-one years of experience in the Army and as a defense contractor, and said that she had left Concerned Veterans for America in 2015 by mutual agreement. She said that she had not communicated with any Democratic members of the Senate and had not provided any news organization with the whistle-blower report on Hegseth. As for her agenda, she said, “I am for a fair process of vetting this cabinet nominee, period.” Dugan insisted that she was “not intimidated” by what she called a “smear campaign.” Nonetheless, she decided that the personal and professional costs of testifying at his hearing were too high.
Reporters have been targets for Hegseth’s defenders, too. (Arthur Schwartz, an adviser to Hegseth who reportedly has close ties to Donald Trump, Jr., sent me a link to the Free Beacon story about Dugan, with a text message saying simply, “You’re such a ridiculous buffoon.”) The insults and intimidation, however, have failed to stanch a growing flood of negative stories on Hegseth, including several from conservative outlets. Both the National Review and the National Interest have published scathing appraisals of Hegseth in the past few days. In the National Review, John Fund, in a piece titled “Pete Hegseth Is a Walking Dead Nominee,” argues that the appointment was a mistake made while Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was taking a few days off; during this period, self-described “disruptors” such as the talk-show hosts Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino persuaded Trump to appoint unqualified favorites of theirs, including Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s aborted pick for Attorney General. (Bongino denies this account.) Though Gaetz’s nomination blew up immediately, Fund wrote, “Hegseth has held on—aided by a thuggish group of online MAGA satellite players who threaten anyone who raises objections.” Christian Whiton, a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest, who worked in the State Department under George W. Bush and Trump, wrote an article laying out a nightmare scenario in which Hegseth, with his lack of expertise, might have to advise Trump on how to respond to a nuclear strike. The Washington Post’s editorial board has identified Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—Trump’s choice for the Department of Health and Human Services—as the Cabinet-secretary nominees too unqualified to be confirmed. And the Associated Press published a news story showing that Hegseth’s history of marital infidelity and insubordination toward a commanding officer violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which, as Defense Secretary, he would be called on to enforce. The report quoted Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator who served as Barack Obama’s defense secretary, as saying, “You can’t minimize how important character is in leadership.”
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s enforcers—whom Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, has called “MAGA’s flying monkeys”—will succeed in pressuring Republican senators to confirm Hegseth. At the earliest, the Senate vote would be on January 20th, following Trump’s Inauguration. “The danger,” Whitehouse told me, “is that people with a lot of resources could threaten and intimidate shy people, or people with fewer resources, from telling the truth.” Dark-money groups, he notes, “are all waging campaigns to whip up the Internet hate community. They create terror and fear, which puts witnesses in an impossible position. Either they stay anonymous, in which case the senators say, ‘I don’t believe you,’ or they go public and get attacked and terrorized by people saying ‘I hope your children die,’ and worse. It’s grotesque stuff.” ♦