Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth addressed concerns over his use of alcohol in an interview with a former colleague, Megyn Kelly, pledging not to drink on the job if confirmed to oversee the vast U.S. military apparatus.
Since President-elect Donald Trump made Hegseth his pick for secretary of defense, reporters have surfaced troubling allegations about his behavior in and outside of the workplace. He allegedly demonstrated a history of alcohol abuse, according to a bombshell report from The New Yorker, and supposedly concerned his colleagues at Fox News by getting very drunk.
An embattled Hegseth said Wednesday that, if confirmed, he would be willing to give up alcohol.
“I’m not going to have a drink at all. It’s not hard for me, because it’s not a problem for me,” he said on “The Megyn Kelly Show.”
“I need to make sure that the senators, and the troops, and President Trump and everybody else knows, when you call me 24/7, you’re getting fully dialed-in Pete, just like you always did in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he continued, adding: “This is the biggest deployment of my life, and there won’t be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I’m doing it.”
Hegseth has been advertising that promise to some of the senators who will decide whether he is qualified to be the secretary of defense.
“He views the job as so important that he volunteered that. I didn’t ask him,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told reporters on the Capitol Hill.
Hegseth claimed that Trump had told him earlier in the day that he still had the president-elect’s support and should keep fighting, despite reports stating Trump was thinking of replacing him with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
The interview with Kelly covered a range of accusations that have plagued Hegseth over the last three weeks.
Asked whether he wanted to speak about The New York Times’ publication of a 2018 email from his mother in which she accused him of being an “abuser of women,” Hegseth said, “I feel for my mom.”
“The days that followed, we worked our way through it,” he said.
The email from Penelope Hegseth came amid her son’s second divorce. She told the Times that she quickly followed up with an apology for words she had written in anger.
“Your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out,” Penelope Hegseth had written in 2018, telling her son to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”
Kelly agreed with Hegseth that “it was so mean” of The New York Times to publish the message.
Penelope Hegseth has since gone on the offensive on behalf of her son, appearing on “Fox & Friends” early Wednesday morning to defend him and lambast the media. She appealed directly to “female senators” by urging them not to trust stories in the news media.
Hegseth also addressed the 2017 police report accusing him of sexual assault at a Republican women’s conference — an accusation that reportedly came as a surprise to Trump’s transition team. The woman told police that she had confronted Hegseth, a keynote speaker at the event, because she felt he did not treat women with respect.
Hegseth admitted that he had paid the woman an undisclosed amount of money to stay silent about the alleged assault, telling Kelly that he thought it was the best course of action.
“I did it to protect my wife, I did it to protect my family, and I did it to protect my job, and it was a negotiation,” he said.
Hegseth claims the encounter in a California hotel room was consensual and has falsely said that police had cleared him of wrongdoing. The matter was merely dropped without further investigation.
He also defended his work leading two veterans’ advocacy organizations after The New Yorker reported that he had grossly mismanaged their funds, allegedly spending lavishly on parties until being forced out.
“There wasn’t a dollar spent that we weren’t proud of spending on behalf of the cause,” Hegseth told Kelly. He complained that reporters never wanted to talk to people who could speak to positive experiences working with him.
“I was not fired. I was not pushed out,” he said.
Kelly appeared to sympathize with Hegseth and cast the media’s reporting on a man who may helm the world’s most powerful military as an orchestrated smear campaign.
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“All I can think is, how are we going to get people to volunteer for public service?” Kelly said at one point. “They’re currently trying to destroy you, not only from this role, but from any job, ever again. From going back to Fox if this doesn’t work out, from going into the private sector. What, ‘He’s an alcoholic, philanderer, rapist, mismanager of money.’ Everything they can pile on you, they’re piling on you.”
In his response, Hegseth said, “The future’s in God’s hands.”
“I think greatness awaits,” Kelly told Hegseth.
Arthur Delaney contributed to this report.