Jackie Calmes: The case of the missing Hegseth investigation

Jackie Calmes, Los Angeles Times on Jan 16, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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For folks who have so harshly turned on the FBI for supposedly targeting Donald Trump over the years, Republicans sure are quick to turn to the bureau when they need a cover-up, er, background check to salvage a troubled Trump pick for high office.

In October 2018, the beneficiary was Brett M. Kavanaugh. Then-President Trump and a Senate Republican majority directed the FBI to investigate sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee to placate Republican senators whose threatened opposition could sink his nomination.

But as I learned in researching a book at the time, the Trump White House told the FBI whom its agents could contact, ignoring willing witnesses with damning information, and gave them just days to finish. The bureau's slapdash Kavanaugh report, merely summarizing agents' interviews without drawing conclusions, was enough political cover for Trump and Senate Republicans to falsely claim he'd been exonerated. Democrats correctly insisted otherwise. Yet it was their word against the Republicans' since the senators-only report remains secret to this day.

And Kavanaugh, comfortably settled into his lifetime seat on the nation's highest court, voted last Thursday — fortunately on the losing side — in favor of blocking Trump's sentencing for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star.

Trump isn't even back in the White House and he's already replayed the FBI card — call it the Trump card — and again apparently successfully, this time for his manifestly unfit choice for Defense secretary, former Fox News host and former National Guard officer Pete Hegseth. With another incomplete, half-baked and secret FBI background check related to alleged sexual assault and excessive drinking, Hegseth got through his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday without a dissenting voice from the Armed Services Committee's Republican majority.

That Hegseth, once considered a dead nominee walking, now looks likely to get confirmed is a shame on the Senate. In 1989, Texas Republican John Tower's reputation for womanizing and drinking got him rejected as President George H.W. Bush's Defense nominee, and Tower was a fellow senator. In the Trump era, however, Republican senators would rather abandon their constitutional responsibility to advise and consent on presidential nominations than stand up to the vindictive Trump. But few are fooled: Many if not most of the Republicans know Hegseth has no business atop the Pentagon, with its nearly 3 million employees and $900-billion annual budget.

As for Trump, the Hegseth episode is evidence just days before his Monday inauguration that the returning president will again abuse his powers over the departments of government, probably more than in his first term.

After all, the Supreme Court's 6-3 right-wing supermajority that he built has since conferred immunity on Trump and future presidents for crimes committed under the guise of official acts. And unlike in his first term, Trump is hiring proven sycophants.

Just compare Hegseth to Trump's first Defense secretary, James N. Mattis, a four-star Marine general, commander in the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq and, out of combat, a top Pentagon official. Mattis lasted two years before resigning in principled protest over Trump's erratic military decisions. It's a safe bet that Trump couldn't have chosen someone so lacking and flawed as Hegseth at the outset of his first term — before his total subjugation of the Republican Party — for fear of bipartisan rejection.

One more lesson from this sorry saga (though I have no hope it will be learned): It's past time to stop the charade of ordering up FBI background checks that aren't, and portraying them as seals of approval for undeserving presidential picks.

Initially, Team Trump opposed FBI checks for the president-elect's controversial Cabinet choices. But the Mar-a-Lago mafia reconsidered after media reports of Hegseth's alleged sexual misconduct, repeated public drunkenness and financial mismanagement of two small veterans groups seemed to all but doom his chances of confirmation. In December, Trump's transition team commissioned the FBI to "investigate" Hegseth.

All parties followed the Kavanaugh investigation playbook: The Trump team, as the FBI's client, told the agency whom to question. The bureau ignored others, according to Democrats informed by those with access to the report. For example: the woman with whom Hegseth had financially settled in 2020 for an alleged rape in Monterey, Calif., in 2017 (which Hegseth denied); the second of Hegseth's three wives, who futilely sought to talk to agents after one perfunctory contact; whistleblowers at the veterans groups Hegseth was forced out of; and Fox News employees who had described his drinking on the job just months ago.

Trump and his Republican allies were nonetheless satisfied, including Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, a veteran and sexual assault survivor who along with other initial Hegseth critics was reportedly subjected to a punishing pressure campaign by Trump allies.

And the report remains secret, more secret than the one on Kavanaugh, which all senators could read. The Hegseth findings went only to the Republican chair and senior Democrat of the Armed Services Committee, as Team Trump dictated. Democratic committee member Sen. Elizabeth Warren protested on CNN: "Show it to us. If there's no negative information, they should be willing to frame it and hang it on the wall."

Exactly.

Throughout his hearing, Hegseth's false mantra on all the allegations against him was "anonymous smears" — many weren't anonymous — even as he implicitly acknowledged the truth of them by repeatedly insisting his is a "redemption story." As Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, noted: "It can't be both." Kelly added: "You know the truth would disqualify you from getting the job."

As soon as Monday the committee is expected to approve Hegseth's nomination and send it to the full Senate. Expect him to be confirmed on a party-line vote, including by senators who will approvingly cite an FBI background check they haven't even read.

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