House Republican Comes Out Swinging Against ‘Amateur Person’ Pete Hegseth and Suggests He Should Be Fired

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) became the first House Republican to suggest that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is no longer fit to keep his job, in scathing comments made to Politico’s Rachel Bade on Monday.

“I had concerns from the get-go because Pete Hegseth didn’t have a lot of experience,” Bacon told Bade, following the bombshell revelations over the weekend that Hegseth had shared national security details in a second Signal group chat – this time one that included his wife.

Bacon, a retired Air Force general, added, “I like him on Fox. But does he have the experience to lead one of the largest organizations in the world? That’s a concern.”

“If it’s true that he had another [Signal] chat with his family, about the missions against the Houthis, it’s totally unacceptable,” Bacon added in his remarks to Politico.

“I’m not in the White House, and I’m not going to tell the White House how to manage this … but I find it unacceptable, and I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge,” he continued, adding:

Russia and China put up thousands of people to monitor all these phone calls at the very top, and the No. 1 target besides the president … would be the secretary of Defense. Russia and China are all over his phone, and for him to be putting secret stuff on his phone is not right. He’s acting like he’s above the law — and that shows an amateur person.

Bacon chairs the subcommittee on cyber issues and has been a fierce critic of Trump’s recent firing of Gen. Timothy Haugh – the commander of the United States Cyber Command at the NSA.

“It looks like there’s a meltdown going on,” Bacon concluded. “There’s a lot — a lot — of smoke come out of the Pentagon, and I got to believe there’s some fire there somewhere.”