After President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory, the mainstream media have turned their attention to trying to take down his cabinet picks, recently focusing their sights on Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth.
Breitbart News has learned the New Yorker is preparing to publish a massive hit piece on Hegseth, using decade-old allegations made by a jealous former coworker that is now being recirculated to media as he prepares for Senate confirmation.
The allegations are from 2014, and were made by a former female associate who was fired from an organization she worked at with Hegseth, the conservative veterans-advocacy group Concerned Veterans of America (CVA).
Some described the former coworker as being on the “periphery of Trump world” for the past decade, and wanting to become a Fox News host and becoming insanely jealous of Hegseth, particularly after he was considered for secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs during the first Trump administration.
That was the time when she wrote and circulated her screed, which attacks CVA for age discrimination and details alleged alcohol consumption by several of the organization’s leaders, including Hegseth, at staff parties and afterwork events in 2014.
She accused Hegseth of being “noticeably intoxicated” at a staff Christmas party, and said that during a Get Out the Vote trip in North Carolina, after volunteers finished door-knocking at 6 p.m., they gathered in their hotel war room and drank beer. She said some CVA staff members, including Hegseth, went out for drinks, coming back at 1 a.m.
She also claimed that in June 2014 after a Defend Freedom Tour event, he got “completely drunk” with a CVA adviser and Medal of Honor recipient Marine Dakota Meyer, and that during another tour, Hegseth and the CVA adviser were flirting with a singer on the tour and “behaving like fraternity members.”
She also railed against a Gold Star wife, criticizing her for becoming “extremely emotional” when giving presentations about the death of her husband in Afghanistan, consistently drinking, and one time publicly vomiting. The former coworker blamed Hegseth for bringing her on board.
In 2014, Hegseth was a 34-year-old captain in the National Guard and had not long before returned from his second war tour — a deployment in Afghanistan as part of the surge.
The former coworker attacked Hegseth as a “part-timer” “parading around as a combat veteran,” claiming he “served behind the wire and never performed combat operations.”
The allegations were completely untrue. Hegseth served in combat in Iraq in 2005, leading a platoon of about 40 men into Baghdad and Samarra. Now-retired Army Sgt. Maj. Eric Geressy, who served with Hegseth, told the Washington Post the fighting was “especially intense.”
“The enemy really threw everything at us there,” Geressy told the Post. “Suicide bombers, mortars, rockets — anything and everything.”
Hegseth’s military awards include a combat infantryman badge — awarded to those in combat.
Toward the end of her screed, the former coworker accused CVA of age discrimination and cutting experienced veteran staff, including herself.
She wrote:
Just about all of the staff/advisers/contractors who created the organization and built it have been cut. All of the original people were brought on by Joe Gecan. Almost all are over 45+ years old and veterans. It seems obvious the young CEO, Pete Hegseth, and his team have no appreciation for anyone having more experience than them and, therefore, to keep in CVA. This can be perceived as age and veteran discrimination. Look at all of the staff and advisers cut and you will see a definite trend.
Army veteran Sam Rogers, a former CVA volunteer and employee, defended Hegseth in a statement:
When you do grassroots advocacy work you meet people where they are, sometimes it’s a church, sometimes it’s a bar, sometimes it’s a hospital. When I reached out to my VA hospital from my third Afghanistan tour and asked for a counseling appointment over mid-tour leave, I was told they were scheduling 6-9 months out and that I should call back after my deployment.
Pete Hegseth led the organization that ultimately secured the most significant veteran healthcare reforms in my lifetime that kept many veterans from suffering similar — though Joe Biden has aggressively undone some of that work on behalf of the VA’s labor union.
He added, “Pete’s work got me into public policy advocacy work and showed a real third way for veterans who wanted to see change in politics. He has far more in common with the shared experiences of regular troops than the retired generals sitting on defense boards making money off of the broken systems they perpetuated.”
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