President-elect Donald Trump's choice to head the Pentagon privately lobbied Trump during his first White House term to pardon former members of the U.S. armed forces accused or convicted of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL chief who allegedly gunned down a young girl and elderly man in Iraq.
Pete Hegseth is an Army veteran who has used his role as a "Fox & Friends" co-host to praise Trump, make the case for a preemptive strike against North Korea, peddle anti-Muslim bigotry, express support for Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza, and divulge bizarre details about his lack of personal hygiene.
Hegseth also had the ear of the former president during his first four years in the White House, acting as an informal adviser. In that capacity, Hegseth reportedly played a key role in securing pardons for three court-martialed U.S. military officers who were accused or convicted of horrific crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As Politiconoted Tuesday, "Hegseth helped capture Trump's attention on a military case that led, in 2019, to full pardons for former Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, both convicted of war crimes."
Lorance was serving a 19-year prison sentence for second-degree murder when Trump pardoned him. Golsteyn was charged with murder in 2018 for killing an Afghan man.
Trump also pardoned Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, "who had been stripped of military honors during his prosecution for murder charges," Politico added.
The New York Timesreported in 2019 that a member of Gallagher's platoon called him "freaking evil" and said that "you could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving." According to the Times, Gallagher was accused by fellow soldiers of "stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death," "picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper's roost," and "indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine-gun fire."
Media Matters for America has documented some of what it described as Hegseth's "eyebrow-raising comments about war crimes."
"In August [2019], he referred to the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square by private security contractors working for Blackwater (now rebranded as Academi) as 'another day on the job in Iraq,' later hosting Blackwater founder Erik Prince to complain about the unfair prosecutions of his former employees who murdered 17 people," the watchdog organization noted. "Hegseth has also said the possibility of pardons is 'very heartening for guys like me,' that it 'could've been me' on trial for war crimes, and that if Golsteyn's actions counted as a war crime, then 'put us all in jail.'"
If confirmed by the Senate or rammed through in a recess appointment, Hegseth—who served in served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantánamo Bay prison—will be tasked with leading a waste-and-fraud-ridden department whose budget accounts for roughly half of all federal discretionary spending.
Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. Army officer who chairs the advocacy group VoteVets, said in a statement Tuesday that Hegseth is "wholly unqualified to head the Department of Defense and hold the lives of our troops in his hands."
"Nothing more need be said," Eaton added.
As likely chief of the Pentagon, Hegseth will also have to contend with a reported Trump plan to purge the military's top ranks of insufficiently loyal generals.
The Wall Street Journalreported Tuesday that Trump—who threatened on the campaign trail to deploy the U.S. military against his political opponents—is "considering a draft executive order that establishes a 'warrior board' of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership."
"If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be 'lacking in requisite leadership qualities,'" the Journal reported, citing a draft of the order. "But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect's past vow to fire 'woke generals,' referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness."
Hegseth, who has said that "we should not have women in combat roles," has signaled support for such a purge, telling an interviewer last week that any general involved in "woke shit" should be fired.
Eaton of VoteVets said Tuesday that the removal of generals seen as disloyal to Trump would "give him what he said he wanted—generals like Hitler had, who do not challenge him, do not tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and do not stand in the way of using the military to crush his political opposition."
If not stopped, Eaton warned, the president-elect's plan would spawn "a MAGA military, pledging fealty to Donald Trump."
