The confirmation prospects of two of Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet choices were in jeopardy over sexual misconduct allegations on Friday in developments mirroring the president-elect’s own history of abusive behavior towards women.
Uncertainty surrounded the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice as defense secretary – whose path to Senate confirmation was already complicated over concerns about his inexperience and extreme views – following revelations that police in California investigated a sexual assault allegation against him in 2017.
No charges were pressed. But the allegations were sufficiently serious for Trump’s newly appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to reportedly speak to Hegseth after she learned of them on Wednesday evening, the day after his nomination.
According to Vanity Fair, which initially reported the story, the incoming president’s own lawyers also talked to Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and army veteran who has railed against – among other things – women serving in military combat roles.
The disclosure compounded the controversy over Matt Gaetz, the far-right Florida congressman nominated as attorney general despite having faced a two-year Department of Justice investigation over sex-trafficking allegations. They included allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old minor.
On Friday, the lawyer for two women who were witnesses in the House ethics committee probe into Gaetz said that one of his clients told the panel she saw the congressman having sex with a minor, according to reports.
Republican and Democratic senators pressed on Friday to see the committee report into Gaetz’s conduct that was commissioned despite the criminal investigation ending without charges.
Gaetz forestalled Friday’s scheduled publication of the report – the contents of which were widely expected to be damaging to him – by resigning from the House immediately after Trump announced his nomination on Wednesday. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has also said he would “strongly request” the report not be published.
But the report’s existence could still in effect torpedo his nomination after senior senators – including Republican John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Senate judiciary committee – demanded that it be preserved for use in Senate confirmation hearings.
The inquiry was originally launched in 2021 to investigate whether the congressman “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House rules, laws, or other standards of conduct”.
Trump is believed to have picked Gaetz as the ideal candidate to conduct a wholesale purge of the justice department, against which he harbors bitter grievances for pressing criminal investigations into his conduct during his first presidency.
Hegseth, likewise, has been selected with a view to purging the armed forces, which he has accused of being hampered by “woke leadership”.
His prospects of doing so seemed to be clouded by disclosure of the 2017 investigation, which stemmed from an alleged incident at the Hyatt Regency hotel and spa in Monterey, California, which was hosting a Republican women’s conference.
The Monterey city manager’s office confirmed the investigation in a brief statement, adding that the alleged incident occurred between midnight on 7 October 2017 and 7am the following morning.
Hegseth reportedly told Wiles and the Trump legal team that it stemmed from a consensual encounter and described the allegation as “he said, she said”, Vanity Fair reported.
The magazine’s website also quoted a source as saying Hegseth had not been vetted. This was countered by a source in Trump’s transition team, who said: “Hegseth was vetted, but this alleged incident didn’t come up.”
The dispute over vetting followed separate reports that standard FBI background checks on some of Trump’s most controversial nominees – designed to uncover past criminal activity and other potentially disqualifying liabilities – had been set aside.
The questions over the sexual behavior of his nominees echo Trump’s own past. The president-elect was ordered to pay $83m damages to the writer E Jean Carroll last year after a New York jury in a civil trial found him liable for sexual assault and defamation. Carroll alleged Trump raped her in 1996, which Trump denied.
His candidacy in the 2016 presidential election was almost derailed following the emergence of an Access Hollywood tape from more than a decade earlier in which he boasted of using his celebrity status to grab women’s genitals.
Sexual misconduct allegations have also dogged Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s selection as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. A former babysitter for his children alleged that Kennedy groped her in his home in 1998. Kennedy responded to the accusation, again reported in Vanity Fair, by saying: “I’m not a church boy.”
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