Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 2, Pt.1....Scroll by if not interested

Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to put the news in context.

Last night, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported that Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth, had been forced to leave previous leadership positions at the advocacy groups Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America because of serious allegations of “financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”

Under his direction, Veterans for Freedom ran up huge debt for what appears to have been inappropriate expenses; the group’s donors squeezed Hegseth out of his job and then shuttered the organization. He moved to Concerned Veterans for America.

A whistleblower for Concerned Veterans for America reported that Hegseth was repeatedly so drunk at events that he had to be carried out, and that he once tried to join dancers on stage at a strip club to which he brought his work team. Their report said that Hegseth and other members of his team divided the female staffers in the organization into “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued them, leading to allegations of sexual assault. Another complaint said that at a bar in the early hours of May 29, 2015, Hegseth began to chant drunkenly: “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

An email from one of the whistleblowers to Hegseth’s successor at Concerned Veterans for America said that “[a]mong the staff, the disgust for Pete was pretty high.” The letter detailed Hegseth’s “history of alcohol abuse” and said he had “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account—for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.”

By 2016, Hegseth was out at Concerned Veterans for America but had joined the Fox News Channel as a contributor. It was during this period that he appeared in October 2017 as a speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women’s convention, where he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman.