‘Downright Un-American’: Top Democrat Rips Hegseth to His Face Over Signal Scandal, Personnel Issues
Screenshot
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) issued a scathing rebuke of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to his face during a two-minute statement where she slammed the ex-Fox News morning show host over everything from Pentagon personnel issues to the Signalgate scandal.
Taking the mic during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday, Murray, the Democrats’ most senior member, wasted no time blasting Hegseth for several issues, including a lack of leadership inside the Pentagon and job cuts in her home state.
Read Murray’s full remarks here:
Secretary Hegseth, you oversee one of the largest and one of the most important organizations on planet earth. More than anything, the Department of Defense needs stable, competent, and strategic leadership. And, much as I had feared back in January, is not what we are seeing under your leadership.
In a matter of months, you have lost top aides and reportedly struggled to hire new ones. You have fired highly respected top military officials. You shared highly sensitive attack plans over Signal, and apparently with people in your own personal circles. And you’ve not taken responsibility for those mistakes. All the while, the security challenges we face have grown larger, not smaller.
And in the face of these challenges, you have taken a series of actions that weaken our posture. For example, in my home state of Washington, which is home to many DoD installations critical to our Indo-Pacific strategy, you have pushed out almost 2,000 highly trained civilian employees, including at Puget Sound naval shipyard.
Mr. Secretary, you talk about returning the department to its mission of warfighting but I am repeatedly hearing that your policy and personnel changes at the Pentagon are undermining, not strengthening our military’s preparedness to protect our country. You are deploying the American military to police the American people. You’re sending the National Guard in to California without the governor’s request.
Sending the Marines not after foreign threats but after American protesters. And now, President Trump is promising heavy force against peaceful protesters at his D.C. Military parade. Those sorts of actions and that sort of rhetoric from a president of the United States should stop every one of us cold. Threatening to use our own troops on our own citizens at such scale is unprecedented. It is unconstitutional and it is downright un-American. We should all be speaking out against this and demanding accountability.
It was Hegseth’s second day of grilling on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, he faced lawmakers from the House Appropriations Committee and got into heated exchanges with Reps. Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).
