Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Gets BAD NEWS as Pick BLOWS IT for before Hearing

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon nomination may not survive new investigative reporting by the New Yorker Magazine, detailing years of financial and personal misconduct, and sexual impropriety and misconduct when he led 2 veterans’ groups, reporting so bad that even his lawyer has started to distance himself from Hegseth, as the Trump Transition team lets it be known that they are “pissed” at Hegseth. Michael Popok predicts that it is likely that Hegseth pulls his own nomination a la Gaetz, and Trump is likely regretting giving the media so much time to “vet” his candidates. Go to GetSoul.com and use code LEGALAF to get 30% OFF your order! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm at the intersection of law politics and the confirmation process, particularly about Hegseth. Let's jump in. People know the basics of his background. Formerly in the military, had been the head of a couple of veterans group funded by the Koch brothers, allegations of sexual assault. But now we have at least six or seven different reports of financial mismanagement for organizations for which he was the head, draining their coffers to use according to the reporting for his own personal sexual conduct behavior and public

drunkenness. We also have reporting that, more detailed reporting about what is alleged to have happened in 2017, which now seems to be completely consistent with his background of public intoxication and inappropriate behavior with a woman that he met at a conference and her allegations of having been raped by him in 2017 but the newest reporting that I have here in the New Yorker Which is basically doing the job along with media outlets of what the FBI would normally do to confirm a to confirm a nominee Apparently we got two major bombshells

coming out of the New Yorker. One is that in 2016, a Republican opposition researcher named Justin Higgins attempted to vet Hegseth for an undersecretary role in the first Trump administration. That was paid for by the Republican National Committee. Higgins later told MSNBC that he believes that after having done that vetting for the undersecretary position, that Hegseth is, quote, perhaps one of the least qualified

picks for Secretary of Defense that we've seen and was likely chosen because he was willing to say and do anything that Trump wants, he does not believe that he is qualified having vetted him for an earlier position. The second bombshell is that this 2017 alleged sex assault, rape, was news to the Trump transition team, and they're pretty pissed about it. Apparently, they did not know about the Monterey incident in 2017. They did not know that the candidate, Hegseth, had a copy in his own possession since 2021 of the report and failed to turn that over. In particular, according to the New Yorker reporting, the transition team for Trump doing

whatever minimal due diligence that they're doing was completely, quote, blindsided by the report and his failure, more importantly, his failure, Hegseth's failure to disclose it to the Trump team, because I guess they're relying on self-reporting for all of their due diligence. He also failed to disclose to the team that he had the report in his back pocket, which according to The New Yorker and some anonymous sources are damning revelations that should have been turned over to them. Quote, one advisor for Trump is alleged to have said to The New Yorker reporter, quote, when we ask, is there anything else we need to know about? That is usually a good time to mention a

police report, a Trump advisor told Rolling Stone magazine. Obviously, the advisor continued, he remembered that this all happened and there is no way, I don't think he could have believed, this wouldn't come out once he got nominated. Look, the fiscal mismanagement goes hand in hand with the allegations of public drunkenness and being completely out of control. During all the times that I'm talking about, Heng Seth was an officer in the reserves, either a captain or a major.

He was a Fox News contributor or anchor. He was the CEO of two veterans organizations and he was pulling down $180,000 a year the two organizations Veterans for freedom he put according to the New Yorker reporting he put into so much debt Basically using it as his own piggy bank that they that there's whistleblower allegations of financial mismanagement is sexual Impropriety and personal misconduct at Veterans for Freedom, which was funded by the Koch brothers, that they shut it down. He then opened up a new veterans organization, also funded by the Koch brothers, called Concerned

Veterans for America, CVA. And that is where all the reporting in the New Yorker magazine comes out of, where there's at least, I counted it, at least six different whistleblower accounts and or emails about Hegseth being publicly drunk, sexually assaulting or abusing or harassing female employees of the company in a predator-like way, including once getting up on stage at a strip club and trying to dance while they were at an event.

Apparently according to these whistleblower commentaries, while he was married, he was using these events to chase women and to act inappropriately and in a depraved way. And secondly, when he got really drunk, I guess, he started chanting, kill all the Muslims, and then publicly urinating in front of the hotel where they were all staying. Now look, just 40 years ago or so, John Tower, who was infamously nominated to be Secretary of Defense, had a shorter history of womanizing and public drunkenness. And that, when he got nominated by George H.W. Bush, and that nomination got killed. I just can't see Hegseth surviving this. They have no one to blame on the Trump administration and the transition team than themselves.

He should never have been nominated. They should have known about his basic failure to get through the screening process for undersecretary the last time around. That was conducted by Republicans. And they now have all of this information about his, and they would have gotten the information with a proper background check, about his failed leadership and mismanagement and financial impropriety that's alleged through whistleblower reports in the two organizations that he ran before he got on the Fox News desk or Fox and Friends bench. And now they're shocked. They're like, oh, we're shocked we didn't know about the Monterey police report. Whose fault is that?

I'm also taking something, I'm interpreting something here. Tim Parlattori, who's the lawyer for Hegseth, who used to be a lawyer for Donald Trump until he fired Donald Trump noisily because he didn't want to continue with the Mar-a-Lago case because Trump was not listening to Parlattori about how to turn documents back over to the Department of Justice appropriately. He was listening instead to Boris Epstein, his insider consulieri, and that got Tim parlatory frustrated and he quit. He now represents Hexsap.

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comes forward with her rape allegations and brings it forward to the Senate, it'll be the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the committee that would be doing the initial part of the confirmation. If they do that, they're gonna sue her. Well, now this new reporting that's in The New Yorker sort of changes that.

And now when they reached Parlatory for comment, he didn't say, we're going to go after her. What he said was that, listen to this little nuance here. Tim Parlatory, when reached for comment by the reporter, Jane Mayer for the New Yorker magazine about these allegations, said, and he was reading from an advisor to Hegseth, not himself, not Parlattori, vouching for Hegseth anymore. He's saying, an advisor of Hegseth wants me to tell you, here we go, could you give yourself

more distance between you and your client? That all of that is false and if you would know that if you ever really conducted proper journalism. That's a pretty weak T for where parlatory was just two weeks ago where he was vigorously shaking his fist at the accuser. I mean, because now there's not, even for instance, even they try to preempt this New Yorker magazine story, the Hegseth team sent out, or they had Breitbart News actually, which has become basically the Trump Talking Points, Trump outlet. Breitbart News tried to critique the New Yorker magazine

article without having seen it. They said, they're going to rely on an email, on an email from a disgruntled female attacking Hexeth, and this is why it's wrong. All right. Well, what they didn't know is there's not just one email that the New Yorker got their hands on. There's more than, it's almost a dozen emails and testimony and the whistleblower report and the Monterey police report. And there we are. They even interviewed the woman involved in the sexual assault, as she's alleged,

about what went down there. And I think what we're learning here is that given enough time, and fortunately, Donald Trump, probably drunk on winning, basically high on winning, decided early that he would name his cabinet well before the 119th Congress returns on the third, sorry, on the third of January. But that's also given a quite a lot of time, almost a month, for the freedom of the press to do their job, the press to do their job, for us to do our job, to get information, to report on it, to do the background checks, to sniff around these obscenely unqualified

unfit candidates, the ones that Stephen Chung on behalf of Donald Trump claims are all high caliber and extremely qualified. We know better. And the press is finally getting around to doing their job and bringing these people down to size. And so that's, I think that was a mistake by Donald Trump. It's good. It's playing into our hands of doing proper reporting.

But the mistake was he should have named these people closer to Jan 3, giving the press little time to do their job. But he's left five, six weeks. And so we get to talk a lot about all of the allegations of financial mismanagement, impropriety, personal impropriety, misconduct, public drunkenness, attacks on women, and the like for somebody like Hegseth. Wait till we turn our attention to RFK Jr. more, to Tulsi Gabbard more, to Dr. Oz more, to Russ Fawt for the Office of Management and Budget.

We're going to have to do it because there's not going to be any FBI investigations of these people. And you can see the transition team for Donald Trump is being caught kind of flat footed. And I put that on Suzy Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, and the rest of the transition team like Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon. They didn't do their job. What job did they do? They all got into a smoke-filled room and decided we're not going to vet anybody and

hope they catch us. All right, we're catching you. Now what? Now it's up to the Senate, in this case, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the minority leaders of that, the Democrats who will be the minority, like Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and the other people who were on the committee that are members of the military to get this guy out and have him drop as nomination.

Based on this reporting, I gotta tell you two things. We saw Gates get pulled after eight days. It was the third fastest in cabinet history. Hex has been hanging on, but I think this Bronco is gonna buck him and throw him off. My telling moment in the article is when Tim Pallatore didn't even defend his own client, he just recited something from an advisor of Hegseth. To me, that's a signal that he doesn't even believe his own client. And if the reporting is to be believed that the Trump transition team is pissed as hell at Hegseth for putting him in this bind.

You might see a please and thank you. Pete Hegseth's got some work to do on his family. He's got effectively two out of wedlock babies. One he married the mother right after. And the second one, he fathered the child, divorced wife number two, and married wife number three who he's still married to. So he's got a whole broken chain. There's a whole trail of broken tears, whatever you call it, broken hearts with Hegseth and sexual assault and rape and allegations and the rest. Continue to follow it right here on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF. If you like

what we're doing, subscribe to the Midas Touch Network and then come over to Legal AF and our YouTube channel where we sit at the intersection of law and politics just like this and hit the subscribe button there. We're doing six or eight different videos a day over there as well. And then you can catch me on Midas Touch and on Legal AF. I'm Michael Popock and I am reporting. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN that's at Legal AF MTN