Toward the beginning of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the panel’s top Democrat, pressed the Pentagon chief on the administration’s missteps on Ukraine. Hegseth responded with a curious claim.
“Joe Biden, with no accountability, gave hundreds of billions of dollars of our weapons to Ukraine,” the secretary testified, as part of an answer that appeared wholly disconnected from the question.
The obvious problem with Hegseth’s line was that he wildly exaggerated what actually happened in the previous administration. As The New York Times reported:
According to a New York Times analysis of Pentagon records and statements, the Biden administration sent Ukraine $33.8 billion in weapons from Defense Department stockpiles under a program called the Presidential Drawdown Authority. The Biden administration also gave Ukraine $33.2 billion in cash to purchase weapons directly from U.S. defense companies under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. That totals about $67 billion in military support since the war began.
But the less obvious problem was that this was the first of several exchanges in which Hegseth, unprompted, fixated on Donald Trump’s Democratic predecessor.
- In his opening comments, the secretary said the Pentagon needs $1.5 trillion in the next fiscal year to address the “mismanagement of the Biden administration.”
- He soon after talked about spending billions on new barracks, “because of the austerity of the Biden administration.”
- Asked about plutonium pit processing in South Carolina, Hegseth thought it’d be a good idea to respond by telling the committee, “Under Joe Biden, Americans didn’t want to join the military.”
- He soon after added that “the environment of our military” is better now that it was “under the Biden administration.”
- When Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs of California asked Hegseth whether he had concerns about Trump’s mental stability, he replied, “Did you ask this same question of Joe Biden?”
- Reminded that the military has always had a merit-based system, the secretary quickly interjected, “Not under the Biden administration.”
- Democratic Rep. Jill Tokuda of Hawaii asked Hegseth how he’d respond if Trump asked him to deploy troops to local voting precincts. He replied by complaining about Biden some more.
It was at that point when Tokuda felt the need to tell the secretary, “You seem to really like Joe Biden.”
This was a memorable and unscripted moment, but Hegseth was undeterred: One day later, he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and kept going, referencing Biden by name six more times.
Trump hasn’t exactly been subtle about his unhealthy fixation with the former president. Evidently, the illness has spread to his defense secretary.
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