Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth becomes first nominee to face confirmation hearing

Hegseth is being introduced by two supportive witnesses.

The first is Norm Coleman, a Republican former senator from Hegseth’s home state, Minnesota:

Pete was a brave soldier, has been an able communicator, and I believe is about to begin a great second act as our secretary of defense.

He has struggled and overcome great personal challenges. Please don’t give into the cynical notion that people can’t change. We need the ones who can change to lead us to be beacons of hope and to remind us that grace can lead us home.

Four years ago, President Biden’s nominee, Lloyd Austin, a good and honorable man, received 97 votes on the floor of the Senate, and we went through the debacle of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Putin invaded Ukraine. The Houthis endanger our shipping lanes. We witnessed Israeli miracles against America’s enemies in the Middle East, where the United States was more of an impediment than a help.

Our recruitment numbers have sunk dramatically, and our southern border has suffered a slow but dangerous invasion. Yes, Pete Hegseth is an out of the box nominee, and I say it’s high time to get out of the box.

The second is the Republican congressman Mike Waltz, who Trump nominated as his national security adviser:

This is a man who can reinvigorate that warrior ethos, and this is a man that will lead. I can’t imagine having a more capable partner in my position as national security adviser. Pete is a man of family, of faith, and he’s committed to making our country stronger again, and most importantly, brother, I know this in my core. He will always have as a first principle the service members that are out there on the frontlines for all of us, at the heart of every decision he makes.

So, senators, I urge you to support this confirmation. It is critical that President Trump has his national security team in place for the challenges ahead.

Reed took issue with Hegseth’s advocacy against diversity issues in the military, as well as his calls to pardon soldiers accused of war crimes.

A former army officer, Reed recounted how when he joined the military in 1970, it “was rife with racial tension”.

Today, “Our military is more diverse than it has ever been, but more importantly, it is more lethal than it has ever been,” Reed said.

He then said he would ask Hegseth to explain his opposition to issues to make the US armed forces more inclusive.

I hope you’ll explain why you believe such diversity is making the military weak, and how you propose to undo that without undermining military leadership and harming readiness, recruitment and retention.

Mr Hegseth, another reason I’m deeply concerned about your nomination is your disregard for the law of armed conflict and your support for service members who have been convicted of war crimes. You have championed the pardoning of military members who were turned in by their fellow soldiers and Seals, and let me emphasize that they weren’t discovered by reporters. They were turned in by fellow soldiers and fellow Seals, and also pardoning of military contractors convicted of killing 14 Iraqi citizens without course.

You have also advocated for the restitution of interrogation methods like waterboarding that have been defined as torture, and you have belittled the advice and counsel of judge advocates general while on deployment.

Now speaking is Jack Reed, the committee’s Democratic ranking member, who quickly told Pete Hegseth that he does not think he is qualified to serve as defense secretary.

“Mr Hegseth, I do not believe that you are qualified to meet the overwhelming demands of this job,” said Reed, who represents Rhode Island.

“We must acknowledge the concerning public reports against you. A variety of sources, including your own writings, implicate you with disregarding the laws of war, financial mismanagement, racist and sexist remarks about men and women in uniform, alcohol abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment and other troubling issues. I reviewed many of these allegations and find them extremely alarming. Indeed, the totality of your own writings and alleged conduct would disqualify any service member from holding any leadership position in the military, much less being confirmed as the secretary of defense.”

Wicker referred to the many allegations of misconduct made against Hegseth, saying they were “anonymous sources” that he did not find credible.

“Much has been made of both Mr Hegseth’s personal life and some of his policy pronouncements regarding his personal conduct. Mr Hegseth has admitted to falling short, as we all do from time to time,” Wicker said.

“It is noteworthy that the vast majority of the accusations leveled at Mr Hegseth have come from anonymous sources. Contrast these anonymous accusations with the many public letters of support and commendation we have seen letters from people who served with Mr Hegseth. These individuals have worked with him professionally. They really know him and his character. These patriotic Americans have been willing to put their names and reputations on the line to support Mr Hegseth. I look forward to sharing these testimonials with the American people.”

The Republican chair went on to acknowledge that Pete Hegseth is an “unconventional” choice to lead the Pentagon, but said he believed the nominee is the right one to turn around a defense department that is not prepared for today’s conflicts.

“Today’s department of defense is no longer prepared for great power competition. It is not a national defense institution ready to achieve and sustain technological supremacy across the range of operations,” Roger Wicker said.

“Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional. The nominee is unconventional, just like that New York developer who wrote down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. That may be what makes Mr Hegseth an excellent choice to improve this unacceptable status quo that I just described.”

The committee’s Republican chairman Roger Wicker politely told Pete Hegseth’s supporters in the audience – and anyone else – that they will not allow disruptions during their hearing.

“We had a very appropriate expression of approval by the members of the audience as our nominee and his family walked in. The distinguished ranking member and I sincerely hope that that is the last signal of approval or disapproval in today’s hearing,” said Wicker, who represents Mississippi.

As Pete Hegseth entered the hearing room, supporters in the audience began clapping and cheering.

Some chanted “USA! USA!” Hegseth shook hands with a few people in the crowd.

The Senate armed services committee will soon begin its confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, the army national guard veteran and former Fox News host who Donald Trump has nominated to lead the defense department.

Since his nomination was announced, reports have emerged of Hegseth drinking excessively and engaging in marital infidelity. He also has faced an accusation of sexual misconduct, which he denies.

During the hearing, he will undoubtedly be asked about these reports, as well as whether he has the experience to lead the massive military bureaucracy.

Follow along as we cover it live.

Despite the supreme court’s immunity ruling, Jack Smith wrote that he believes the charges he filed against Donald Trump still held water.

He notes that his team was able to secure a superseding indictment from a grand jury after the top court handed down its ruling, which gave Trump immunity for official acts taken as president.

Referring to his original indictment handed down by a grand jury in August 2023, Smith wrote:

Because of the unprecedented facts and the variety of legal issues that would be litigated in this case, the Office was aware that the case would involve litigation risks, as would any case of this scope and complexity. However, after an exhaustive and detailed review of the law, the Office concluded that the charges were well supported and would survive any legal challenges absent a change in the law as it existed at the time of indictment.

He then recounts how he was able to again indict Trump on the same charges, but using evidence that was admissible under the supreme court’s ruling:

The Supreme Court’s decision required the office to reanalyze the evidence it had collected. The original indictment alleged that Mr. Trump, as the incumbent president, used all available tools and powers, both private and official, to overturn the legitimate results of the election despite notice, including from official advisors, that his fraud claims were false and he had lost the election.

Given the supreme court’s ruling, the office reevaluated the evidence and assessed whether Mr. Trump’s non-immune conduct-either his private conduct as a candidate or official conduct for which the office could rebut the presumption of immunity-violated federal 33 law. The office concluded that it did. After doing so, the office sought, and a new grand jury issued, a superseding indictment with identical charges but based only on conduct that was not immune because it was either unofficial or any presumptive immunity could be rebutted.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House led Jack Smith to dismiss the charges he brought against the former president, but in his report, he notes that he never intended his case to affect the 2024 election.

“The office’s exceptional working pace ensured that its investigative work could be completed, charging decisions could be made, and any necessary indictments could be returned by the summer of 2023, long before the election,” Smith wrote.

“The office had no interest in affecting the presidential election, and it complied fully with the letter and spirit of the Department’s policy regarding election year sensitivities.”

Smith succeeded in handing down his indictment of Trump in 2023, but legal wrangling in the case prevented it from going to trial before the November 2024 election.

A major aspect of that delay was the supreme court’s consideration of Trump’s argument that he was immune from prosecution, which put the case on pause for months. The court ultimately handed down a decision that narrowed Smith’s case, only for it to end entirely after Trump won re-election.

Jack Smith wrote that Donald Trump knew his allegations of fraud in the 2020 election were false, but continued to make them anyway.

“Mr Trump’s false claims included dozens of specific claims regarding certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for Mr Trump to votes against him. These claims were demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false,” Smith said in his report into his attempt to prosecute Trump on election subversion charges.

He continued:

The Office investigated whether Mr Trump believed the claims he made. Evidence from a variety of sources established that Mr Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election. He knew this because some of the highest-ranking officials in his own Administration, including the vice-president, told him directly that there was no evidence to support his claims. Mr Trump’s private advisors, both within and outside of his Campaign, told him the same.

In his report detailing his attempt to prosecute Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat, former special counsel Jack Smith hit back at claims by the president-elect that he pursued the charges for political reasons.

“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully,” wrote Smith, who resigned from the justice department last week.

He added that “nobody within the Department of Justice ever sought to interfere with, or improperly influence, my prosecutorial decision making”.

“And to all who know me well, the claim from Mr Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote.

Donald Trump has started his morning off by posting on Truth Social a message of support for Pete Hegseth, his nominee for the post of defense secretary.

The president-elect wrote:

Pete Hegseth will make a GREAT Secretary of Defense. He has my Complete and Total support. Good luck today, Pete!

The Biden administration has raced to allocate $74bn of funding for climate initiatives before Donald Trump’s inauguration, leaving $20bn vulnerable to potential rollback by the incoming president, new figures reveal.

As the inauguration of Trump looms, the outgoing administration has been accelerating its allocation of cash for climate change and clean energy programs before they are throttled by the incoming US president.

Laden with funds from the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden administration is rushing to lock in support for renewable power, electric vehicles, batteries and other initiatives aimed at combating the climate crisis in a way that Trump cannot easily axe.

Trump has vowed to kill off what he calls the “green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds” once he becomes president on 20 January. “That will be such an honor,” the president-elect said on the campaign trail, calling the climate bill “the greatest scam in the history of any country”.

While Trump will be able to stymie unallocated spending, funding already committed will be difficult to claw back. The Biden administration has therefore been racing to push out money to make it Trump-proof, having now allocated $74bn of IRA funding, according to figures provided by Atlas Public Policy.

You can read the full story, by Oliver Milman and Aliya Uteuova, here:

As we reported in an earlier post, special counsel Jack Smith wrote in a partially released report that Donald Trump would have been convicted of illegally trying to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election if he had not been successfully re-elected four years later.

Trump had been indicted in August 2023 on charges of working to overturn the election, but the case was delayed by appeals and ultimately significantly narrowed by a conservative-majority supreme court that held for the first time that former presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.

Though Smith sought to salvage the indictment, the team dismissed it entirely in November because of longstanding justice department policy that says sitting presidents cannot face federal prosecution.

In a post to Truth Social this morning, Trump wrote:

To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1:00am in the morning. Did he say that the Unselect Committee illegally destroyed and deleted all of the evidence.

Trump has suggested, without evidence, that the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the effort to subvert the 2020 result – which the president elect falsely claimed was rigged against him – had destroyed evidence because it it showed how “totally innocent” he was.

In the end, Trump calculated correctly that he could outrun the law by staging a spectacular political comeback and regaining the White House, as my colleague David Smith notes in this story.

Donald Trump plans to issue a flurry of executive orders and directives after he is sworn in as president on Monday. Sources have told Reuters this could be as much as 100 for day one and beyond. Transition advisers have been preparing orders for the president-elect to choose from. Decisions still need to be made on which ones will be released on Monday – inauguration day – and which will come out afterwards.

The Reuters news agency has compiled the following breakdown of what these orders, which range from immigration to the economy, may look like:

Immigration

• Many of the actions that the Republican plans on his first day as president are aimed at ramping up immigration enforcement and following through on his pledge to deport record numbers of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. The executive actions would give federal immigration officers more latitude to arrest people with no criminal records, send more troops to the US-Mexico border, and restart construction of the border wall, Reuters reported in November.

• Trump is expected to declare illegal immigration a national emergency to unlock military funds for border wall construction. He also signaled in a Truth Social post in November that he would shift military resources to assist with his deportation plans.

Energy

• Trump is reportedly considering a suite of executive orders to roll out within days of taking office targeting everything from electric vehicles to withdrawing again from the Paris climate agreement, a move he took in his first administration. Members of his transition team are recommending sweeping changes to cut off support for electric vehicles and charging stations and to strengthen measures blocking the import of cars, components and battery materials from China, according to a document seen by Reuters.

Tarrifs

• Trump could follow through on his threats to increase tariffs on imported goods from America’s biggest trading partners. He thinks tariffs would help boost economic growth in the US, although opponents warn that the costs would likely be passed down to consumers.

Pardons

• Trump has said he will take action immediately on taking office to issue pardons for some of the hundreds of people convicted or charged in connection with the US Capitol attack in early January 2021. Although JD Vance, the incoming vice-president, has said Trump supporters who carried out violence during the riot should not be pardoned by him after he begins his second presidency.

We are leading today’s blog on the upcoming Senate confirmation hearing for president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth (see post at 08.53 for more details).

Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has written a letter to Hegseth ahead of the hearing, expressing her concerns about his suitability for the high-profile role.

In the letter, she wrote:

I have serious concerns about your qualifications to serve in this role given your past history, including mismanagement of two non-profit organizations you ran, accusations of sexual assault and drinking problems, your blatant disregard for the contributions of female servicemembers, support for war crimes and torture, threats to politicize the military, advocating for ‘war’ against political enemies, threats to undermine DoD readiness and diversity, and contempt for veterans receiving benefits they earned.

“We cannot have a defense secretary whose fellow servicemembers feel concerned enough about to report as a potential insider threat,” she wrote in the letter (Hegseth was branded an “insider threat” by a fellow member of the Army National Guard over his tattoos. He said the incident led him to be pulled from Guard duty in Washington during Biden’s inauguration).

Warren, who has been a vocal opponent of Trump, co-sponsored the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act of 2019 to strengthen the ethics requirements that govern presidential transitions. In recent weeks, Trump’s party has coalesced around his pick for defense secretary. “I look forward to discussing (Hegseth’s) plans to shake up DoD (Department of Defense) and protect the warfighter,” Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin said yesterday. Cabinet nominees almost never lose Senate votes, so it is likely, looking at it in a historical context at least, that Hegseth will be confirmed.

The Biden administration is in its final week before Trump returns to the White House. Foreign policy dominated his term. Wars are raging in the Middle East (with Washington backing Israel’s assault on Gaza while conducting targeted airstrikes in Syria, Yemen and Iraq), Russia’s war on Ukraine is continuing, and there is growing tensions between China and Taiwan. Biden was much criticised for the chaotic withdrawal of the US military from Afghanistan in 2021. Of course there are many more conflicts around the world but these areas have been the main ones Washington has focused on. Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent, has written this analysis about whether or not the Biden administration has been successful on foreign policy issues after the outgoing president said the US is “winning” on the world stage. Here is an extract from his story:

On paper, few US presidents could boast the foreign policy bona fides of Joe Biden, a veteran statesman with nearly a half-century of experience before he even stepped into office.

But as his term comes to an end, critics have said that the president will leave a legacy of cautious and underpowered diplomacy, as even allies have conceded that the administration is still grasping for a cornerstone foreign policy success.

That hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from declaring victory in its final days – and scrambling to secure a last-minute ceasefire in Gaza that could potentially salvage that legacy before Trump steps into office.

“Thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition,” Biden said in a final foreign policy speech on Monday delivered at the state department. “Compared to four years ago, America is stronger, our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker.”

If this is winning, many Americans may struggle to imagine what losing would look like.

Biden’s administration has spent much of its time and political capital abroad attempting to contain a series of foreign wars and crises in which it has seemed impotent to impose its will.