Pete Hegseth’s Mom Ratting Him Out Was Not Yet (!) Rock Bottom for the TV Host

National treasure Jane Mayer has the grotesque skinny on Pete Hegseth, to whom the incoming administration is planning to hand the most powerful military in the history of the world. You might have figured we touched bottom on this guy’s nomination when his mom gave him up. But you would be wrong. From The New Yorker:

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.

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.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

As it happens, I occasionally have fallen into conversation with some people who have worked as keepers of the peace at ecdysiastical establishments, and I can say with some confidence that Dudes Who Get Up Onstage are considered to be the most loathsome patrons in the entire service industries. The ladies all hate them. The bouncers hate them. The bouncers hate them because someone has to go up there and get them. Now one of them is going to run an institution forever grappling with a serious sexual-assault problem. But, hey, those Friday night keggers at the Pentagon are gonna be ... awesome, dude!

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