During Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appearances on Capitol Hill last week, he repeatedly leaned on a lazy rhetorical strategy: Confronted with tough questions, the beleaguered Pentagon chief tried to defend himself by changing the subject to the recent past.
When Hegseth was pressed, for example, to defend his record of mass firings at the Defense Department, he had an answer he appeared to have prepared in advance. “Under Barack Obama, 197 general officers were removed,” he said in sworn testimony. “So this is not something specific to this administration.”
The problem, however, is that the secretary’s defense wasn’t true, and as The New York Times reported, “The number Mr. Hegseth gave has no basis in fact.”
Making matters worse, this was not the only instance in which the former Fox News host relied on false claims about recent Democratic administrations.
The defense secretary was also asked whether he’d be willing to deploy U.S. troops to local voting precincts ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Instead of answering the question directly, Hegseth again looked backwards, in keeping with his borderline-creepy fixation on Joe Biden.
“I will note that in 2024, troops were — that was Joe Biden by the way, Joe Biden — were deployed to polling locations in 15 states,” Hegseth said in sworn testimony to the House Armed Services Committee. For good measure, he repeated, “2024 — Joe Biden — troops deployed to polling locations in 15 states. Explain that one to me.”
A day later, the secretary made the same claim in nearly identical wording during sworn testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Readers can probably guess where this is headed. CNN reported:
All of the National Guard activations connected to the 2024 election were ordered by state governors, not by Biden. And all 12 of the states that responded to CNN’s requests for information said that none of their troops were deployed to polling locations.
Rather, the states said their Guard personnel worked behind the scenes at other locations — helping with election cybersecurity or serving as internal liaisons — or that their state Guard was not actually activated for the election after all.
Or put another way, Hegseth didn’t merely push a false claim about the Obama era, he also twice pushed a very specific false claim about the Biden era about which he got literally every detail wrong.
I will leave it to legal experts to assess whether the secretary crossed any lines by saying untrue things to Congress while under oath, but at this point, there are two questions the secretary and the Pentagon really ought to answer: (1) How and why did Hegseth prepare bogus talking points for sworn congressional testimony? and (2) Maybe now Hegseth can answer truthfully and specifically about his possible plans for the 2026 midterm elections?
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