Caught up by an old accusation of sexual assault and tattoos which caused him to be excluded from Joe Biden's inauguration four years ago, ex-soldier and television presenter Pete Hegseth, chosen by Donald Trump for the Pentagon , finds himself on the defensive. According to the Washington Post, the latter paid an unknown amount of money to his accuser several years later, as part of a confidentiality agreement, while maintaining that their relationship was consensual.
The president-elect's transition team created a sensation by announcing Tuesday the choice of this former National Guard officer and morning host on the conservative Fox News channel to lead the armed forces, despite his lack of experience. But she herself was taken by surprise by the revelation of an accusation against him for sexual assault in 2017, report several American media.
No complaint was ultimately filed against the 44-year-old television man, whose appointment has yet to be confirmed. But the affair betrays a virtual absence of “vetting”, the scrupulous and intrusive process of filtering aspirants to the highest offices which is usually the rule in the United States, according to the media.
“An empty shell that plays tough”
A former Republican executive who had already carried out this meticulous investigative work in 2016, Justin Higgins, said he judged Pete Hegseth at the time “insufficiently qualified” for the junior positions of Secretary of State for Defense or Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration for which he was tipped.
In eight more years at Fox News, he has not acquired the skills necessary to lead a titanic administration – 3.4 million soldiers and civilian employees for an annual budget of more than $850 billion – estimates Justin Higgins in an article published Saturday by MSNBC.
“But Hegseth compensates for the experience he lacks with a dangerous partisan speech,” he adds, seeing this as the reason for this choice. “He's an empty shell who plays tough on television. It is not difficult to imagine that he will do and say whatever Trump wants,” he asserts.
In a video that has reappeared these days and is circulating on the networks, we see Hegseth participating in an ax throwing competition and missing the target. The weapon hits a drummer who is nearby and who narrowly escapes serious injury.
A graduate of the prestigious Princeton and Harvard universities, the former infantry officer served 18 years in the National Guard. He was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he earned two prestigious military medals.
Married three times, Pete Hegseth denounces a “wokist” drift in the armed forces and is opposed to the presence of female soldiers in combat. He boasts of having obtained from Donald Trump a presidential pardon for two soldiers convicted of murder and the reinstatement of a third, convicted of posing with a corpse in Iraq.
Symbol of the Crusades
Another subject of controversy, he himself revealed that he was one of the dozen soldiers excluded from the security system for the inauguration of Democratic President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, in an interview on the podcast of the former member of the forces Shawn Ryan specials, airing two days after the November 5 presidential election.
“I was accused of extremism because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington,” he declared, showing on his chest the Jerusalem cross, an emblem dating back to the Crusades, assuring that “it it is simply a Christian symbol.” But according to several media, it is not this tattoo alone, but also the inscription “Deus vult”, “God wills it” in Latin, a rallying cry of the First Crusade in the 11th century recovered in recent years by the supremacist movement white, which had aroused the suspicions of his superiors.
One of his books, “American Crusade”, published in 2020, evokes this reference. “A thousand years ago, after years of ceding ground to the conquering Muslim hordes, the Pope ordered military action to save Europe,” he wrote, recalling the meaning of “Deus vult” at the time.
