Connect with us

News

House Republican Says They Were Told ‘In Conference’ Hegseth Accusations ‘Were Anonymous’

Published

on

A key Republican who sits on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees is defending Donald Trump’s embattled nomination of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense amid a flurry of allegations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, on-the-job use of alcohol and “aggressive drunkenness,” mistreatment of women — an accusation by his own mother — an affinity for Christian nationalism, and financial mismanagement of two veterans’ charities.

U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA), who has an extensive résumé in the U.S. Armed Forces and is a medical doctor, says he and his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill were “told” that the allegations against Hegseth were “anonymous,” that Hegseth himself does not know who made the allegations, and that Hegseth is “saying to us … ‘it’s an empty allegation of an anonymous tip.’ ”

But Hegseth has admitted to the sexual encounter, although he has “maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer,” The Washington Post has reported. In addition to the statement from his attorney, The Post also cites “other documents” it has obtained.

The sexual assault allegation involves a married woman who was attending a Republican conference with her husband and two children in 2017. She has accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her. She reportedly had no memory of how she got to his room, where, she alleged, he prevented her from leaving.

READ MORE: Trump’s Guilfoyle Nomination Surfaces Allegations Old and New

“Her next memory was when she was on the bed or couch and ‘Hegseth was over her,’ barechested, his dog tags ‘hovering over her face,’ the [police] report said,” according to The Independent. “After ejaculating on her stomach, Hegseth ‘threw a towel at her and asked her ‘are you ok?’ ‘ the police report said.”

Hegseth denies the assault allegations but did come to a financial settlement with her, which required her to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

“A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Pete Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public,” The Guardian reported last month. “The 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired – one that is at odds with Hegseth’s version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event and Hegseth.”

The details appear to be in conflict with the narrative the Trump campaign and Trump’s and Hegseth’s allies have claimed.

“A spokesperson for the Trump transition said … that the ‘report corroborates what Mr Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false,'” The Guardian reported, before disputing that claim.

“The report does not say that police found the allegations were false. Police recommended the case report be forwarded to the Monterey county district attorney’s office for review.”

The Guardian also explained that a nurse, and not the alleged victim, had contacted police.

READ MORE: ‘Pay-to-Play’: Trump Offers ‘Fully Expedited’ Approvals for $1 Billion Investments

“Investigators were first alerted to the alleged assault, the report said, by a nurse who called them after a patient requested a sexual assault exam. The patient told medical personnel she believed she was assaulted five days earlier but could not remember much about what had happened. She reported something may have been slipped into her drink before ending up in the hotel room where she said the assault occurred.”

USA Today reported last month that “Hegseth’s statement to police directly conflicts with a 2017 witness account − and with recent statements by Hegseth’s attorney, who said he was visibly intoxicated on the night in question and that his alleged victim was ‘the aggressor in the encounter.'”

But on Wednesday, Congressman McCormick told C-SPAN the allegations against Hegseth were “anonymous tips.”

Hegseth, McCormick said, has done “a really good job of showing up against those accusations, which are anonymous, which nobody at Fox will say anything.”

“They’re like, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking — I don’t know what they’re talking about when they they talk about these anonymous complaints.’ He doesn’t know what’s talking about. His wife doesn’t know what’s going on.”

“We’re all, they’re all kind of like, ‘just show me who it is, and and let’s address it, because, I don’t know who it is,'” McCormick said.

“Okay,” the C-SPAN host responded, “but he paid a settlement, so he does know who it is.”

“No,” McCormick insisted, “he didn’t know who it is, and and he saying to us, ‘it’s an empty, it’s an empty allegation of an anonymous tip.’ That’s that’s not the same thing. And and so that’s that’s why I heard the same thing as you, and I had my concerns. But that’s not what we were told in conference. We were told, ‘no, these are anonymous tips. We don’t know where they came from.'”

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Swarm of MAGA Attacks’ Making Hegseth Confirmation Seem More Likely: Report

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

 

 

 

 

There's a reason 10,000 people subscribe to NCRM. You can get the news before it breaks just by subscribing, plus you can learn something new every day.
Continue Reading
Click to comment
 
 

Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.

NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

News

Trump White House Turns on ‘Moron’ MAGA Loyalist ‘Begging for an Additional Brain Cell’

Published

on

The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.

“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”

“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”

Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”

She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”

On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”

The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.

“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”

In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”

 

 

 

Continue Reading

News

Veteran Journalist War-Games Trump’s ‘Rolling Coup’ — and How It Fails

Published

on

Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”

Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.

Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”

“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”

Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.

“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”

Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.

January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.

That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.

Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.

One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”

The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”

Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”

Read the entire article here.

 

Image via Reuters 

Continue Reading

News

‘Be Very Afraid’: Carville Warns Trump ‘Everybody Is Out for You’

Published

on

Political strategist James Carville has a warning for President Donald Trump: be afraid, because everyone is leaking.

Carville responded to a viewer’s remarks about a recent Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan article. The viewer, citing Carville himself, said, “people in the Trump White House are leaking, like, crazy.”

“Don’t trust anybody,” Carville warned. “They got tapes, everybody. They’re — everybody in the administration is s—— all over you, and they’re just getting warmed up.”

“The other effect, come after November, is these people realize that their careers are for all intents and purposes gone,” Carville explained. “No one’s gonna want to hire anybody out of the Trump administration, and the way that you get right with history is start leaking.”

“And you position yourself as the person that tried to tell them,” he warned administration officials. “That’s the only future you have. Leak like a sieve, leak like a broken faucet, leak everywhere.”

“You’re already leaking,” he continued. “Everybody’s leaking on you, everybody’s leaking on everybody else. Trust no one.”

“That’s what, that’s my message to anybody that works in this administration, and if, I’ll give you one piece of advice, Donald Trump, everybody is out for you, even your own people,” Carville said.

“Be scared. Be very afraid.”

It’s unclear which article the viewer was referencing, but Haberman and Swan have a new book about to be released, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Axios earlier this week reported, “Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, ‘Regime Change.'”

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”

Axios also noted that it has heard that “President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Haberman and Swan’s book “reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.”

Among them, that the “top echelon of White House officials was fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” that “Trump wanted revenge against those he felt had wronged him — even when he couldn’t remember their names,” and that “Trump enjoyed comparisons of his power to that of Mao and Genghis Khan.”

Also, the Times noted, one morning White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found Trump with “a tube of super glue in his hand,” as he “was trying to adorn the marble fireplace mantel with new golden decorations.”

Image via Reuters

 

 

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2026 AlterNet Media.