Sen. Tommy Tuberville is all aboard the Pete Hegseth train, calling the rape allegations against the Fox News weekend host “stuff” that was “years ago.” The Alabama Republican went on Fox Business on Monday to say that Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Defense is good stuff.
"The thing about Pete is he's well-spoken,” Tuberville said, when asked about allegations that Hegseth raped an unconscious woman, whom he allegedly drugged. “It's all out there, people are going to look at it. But a lot of this stuff was years ago.” It was seven years ago.
"Now, again, you got to be responsible for your actions,” Tuberville continued. “But Pete is, he's done everything he possibly can do to get it out there to talk to people again." In fact, Tuberville thinks the confirmation hearing shouldn't be about "his past references."
Tuberville seemed to think that while Hegseth’s rape allegations may have been a long time ago, it’s his military experience that really counts, even though that’s also ancient history. Per the AP, “Hegseth was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard, serving overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Guantanamo Bay.” That was in 2003.
The senator spoke to reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday, saying he had a good meeting with Hegseth and he thought that he would “straighten the military out to get the woke, the DEI affiliation, out.”
“He's got great work ethic. He's very, very smart. He understands the business side as well as the military side—been in 20 years. He's actually fought in wars,” Tuberville told reporters.
Those wars happened long before Hegseth’s alleged rape that was so long ago, according to Tuberville, that it’s not worth discussing.
Tuberville seems to have forgotten that Hegseth was barred from serving at Biden’s inauguration due to a report from a fellow service member that he might be an “insider threat,” sporting tattoos considered by many to be signals of white nationalist adherence.
Tuberville’s approval of Hegseth is special coming from the guy who held up military promotions for almost a full year to score political points with right-wing culture war extremists.
Hegseth has been mired in scandals since Trump nominated him. Those include sexual assault allegations, anti-Muslim bigotry, the possibility that he's a straight-up white supremacist, and even his own mother has described him as an abusive misogynist.
On Sunday, The New Yorker reported that he was forced to step down from both of the nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran “in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.” In a whistleblower report obtained by the outlet, Hegseth does not sound like someone who can “straighten” anything out, let alone the military.
The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.”
This is just one of the reasons why Trump and his team want a servile Senate who will allow him to fill out his Cabinet with recess appointments.
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