The Chaser Report - Pete Hegseth's Mixed Signals

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

If you get added to any highly confidential administration group chats, please send them the link to this episode.Watch OPTICS on ABC iview here:https://iview.abc.net.au/show/opticsCheck out more Chaser headlines here:https://www.instagram.com/chaserwar/?hl=enBuy Pete Hegseth a drink:https://chaser.com.au/support/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. And Charles, I feel like we're behind the trend in terms of means of communicating with our audience. I was, you know, enthusiastic about podcasting, but we've been doing it for five years now. I think it's time to acknowledge that mass communication has changed. And I think we should say, as of today, this is the last episode of the Chaser Report. In future, what we will be doing is adding anyone who's interested into a giant group chat.

Yes. We may not know that you're there and the possibility of faux paths, but particularly if you have confidential information and would like to be added to our group chat. Yeah. And everyone knows Charles's number. You can just do it through that. You know that I got added to Alba's group chat. Did you really?

Yes, that's how I knew about the election before you did or before anyone did, because I was accidentally added. The thing is, it was so fucking lame and. That I excused myself and I did a Jeffrey Goldberg and decided it was in the interests of the nation as well as the interest. To leave. Yeah, to leave. As well as the interests of myself. I assume you leaked all of the really relevant and important message.

Yeah, yeah. It was just like a blank. And actually I got added to Peter Dutton's one. Oh, yeah. And they discussed all their policies. So I've got nothing to tell you. Hey. Hey.

All right. So let's take a quick break and just add each other to the group. chats and then we look i've got a yarn about peter hegg's head which kind of explains every okay so we'll talk about the u.s just to be really clear we undertake as the chaser report you know we've got a bit of a heritage when it comes to australian elections we know that at the point where they do anything that passes the threshold to talk about on the podcast we will talk about it won't we charles i mean we talked about the fact that the election are being called yeah yeah there may not be much to discuss until the third of may yeah there's nothing nothing to see here

But if there is anything different or new or surprising that happens on the campaign trail, we probably still won't talk about it. We might. We might do it. Anyway, let's do those ads and review our group chats. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore?

FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. So, Charles, the New York Times is reporting, interestingly enough, that Donald Trump has spent essentially the past week asking everybody whether he should fire his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, the guy who added Jeffrey Goldberg to the signal chat. He's defended him in public. I just want to know how many group chats there are where Donald Trump is asking people whether or not he should fire him. I mean, he had to be briefed on how all this work.

Apparently, he's never been on a group chat. He doesn't text. No, he's not. He doesn't understand any of this sort of stuff. Yeah. Remember when they used to print out tweets for him to reply to? Well, like, I'm old enough to remember that, like, I had a clerical job for an unnamed senior politician many, many years ago, just for, you know, a few weeks. And one of the things we had to do was print out all the emails.

Oh, wow. And then they would handwrite their response, and then you'd have to type up the response. Well, it wouldn't have been Malcolm Turnbull, founder of his email. Wow, how interesting? Yeah, that does seem very low-fi. Of course, if Donald Trump was still doing this, still doing this in 2020, not actually looking at the phone. But, all right, so Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, he was also on the chat. The chat started out, if you haven't been following the story, it started out.

Everyone's been following this story. But just to be clear on Hegseth's trial. Okay, right, yeah. They started out. Peter Heseth, who's the Secretary of Defense, formerly a weekend host on Fox News. In charge of the biggest military superpower, the world was ever saying. In charge of the Pentagon. Originally, it was just like, okay, who on your team's going to handle the coordination on

this. And then Pete Hick-Seth went, oh, the package is being delivered. I think it sound like the worst Amazon delivery in the world. That's what they talk about at the Pentagon. Package delivery, Charles, and people are being killed by bombs. Yes. So the story I've got about Peter Hegseth dates back to February.

Oh, yeah. And the question, when Hegseth was being confirmed. Yeah, he was being vetted by Congress and he had to go through a whole process. There was this concern that Pete Hegseth has a bit of very for enjoying the odd beer or 17. Has he drunk with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh?

Because probably he has. Yes. And in particular, and not so much beer so much as what the polite press described as brown liquid, i.e. whiskey. Right. And when are we calling whiskey brown liquid? That's a, well, the problem is that appetizing. Well, the whole thing is it was a sort of, it was during that confirmation thing

where people were photographing him and he kept on being caught drinking brown liquid. They didn't want to allege that he was a complete drunk. Right. But, you know, they'd just say brown liquid. So it could have been Coca-Cola. Yeah, it could have been Coca-Cola, exactly, right, yeah. The funny thing is, during that period, there was a profile done by a journalist who

had met him years before. Right. And was writing a little puff piece for one of, I think it was like Vanity Fair or New York, that sort of magazine, and, and recounted his, you know, encounters with Pete Heggshead, which is he turns up at 10 a.m. at this cafe slash sort of, you know, diner in the US to profile this guy. And Pete Higg said orders two glasses of wine as part of their brunch, right?

And the guy goes, no, no, no, I'll just get something solved. It's nothing you wouldn't have done at a brunch, child. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like, two am I to judge. Convivial, right? And so, and the reporter goes, no, no, no, I won't have that. And Pete goes, no, come on, come on, come on, come on. Like, you know, this is, it's 10 a.m.

Breakfast wine. And then what happens is the reporter sort of demurs but doesn't actually drink it, like he just leaves it untouched, during which time, and then for the next couple of hours, Pete Hicks here holds large on all the things about his life, but then also continues to order like wine and then a martini and then a scotch, right? Did he drink the second glass of wine? And this is the, this is the detail. What I want to know.

Which is he then went, are you going to have that? And he drank the guy's wine, right? It would have been rude to leave it, which is... It's rude to the sommelier, Charles. Which is why, when the whole text scandal broke a few days ago, one of the questions that the Democrats were asking was, and they asked this in Congress, was Pete Higgseth drinking at 11am when he sent all those texts

where he basically downloaded all the secret plans, the war plans, right? But surely, Charles, by this point, if he's continued that sort of pattern of behaviour, he would be very good at holding his breakfast, breakfast booth. Yeah, exactly. And because initially I'd been thinking, oh, 11 a.m. wouldn't be drunk. But then you remember the other article? You go, oh, no, yeah, he would have been totally, yeah, he could hold his wife. I've been to sports bars to watch.

I used to watch, you know, football games at 9 in the morning or something. And you'd see some gentleman in there who'd clearly had a 7 a.m. bottle. And they were, I mean, they were in fantastic shape, Charles. I'd definitely put them in charge of the Pentagon. So this is Pete Hegseth addressing NATO. This is back in February. And he... Oh, he's having a sip as something.

He's having a sip of a brown liquid. Hmm. And it's just a very small amount of brown liquid. Literally while he's holding a NATO press conference. Well, I mean, a little bit of Dutch courage before you face NATO. Yeah. They're scary people. But, child, there are some, to be fair, some more, even more concerning allegations about Pete Hegseth.

Well, no, you didn't let me do my joke. Oh, sorry. Which is not my, which is not my jokes. Which is that apparently, Ben Hegsheth has been accused of being a DUI hire. That's actually pretty good. That's a good joke. It's a good good. Although, I'm afraid, you can't even make jokes about DEI anymore in America.

All right. You won't get back in. Is it too woke to even make a joke about? You can't, yeah, it's been cancelled. Sorry, everything to do with DEI has been cancelled. So, wait a minute, even jokes about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. You finish.

It's all over. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca.

The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. If we wanted to take the podcast in a fairly dark direction. Yeah, definitely. I could discuss some of the news stories that had come up. about what they've been doing to some international students in the US who, you know, attended pro-Palestine rallies and been hauled off in vans to prisons in the middle of nowhere and are getting kicked out of the country

for participating in a protest. Yes. But let's not do that. Let's talk more about Pete Hegsef. Well, no, no. As the chilling kind of pro-Trump authoritarianism descends on American campuses. And this is, this came out during the vetting confirmation

when they were saying, is this man a suitable choice for being a defense department secretary? So the question of, is he at all qualified having just come from a Sunday show on Fox News? I mean, clearly, the president thought that he was, so no one dared to question that. Yeah, so this is from PBS. There was an affidavit during the confirmation process that Hegsseth's former sister-in-law had alleged that he, Heggseth, had been abusive to his second wife to the point where she feared for her safety and that she actually had established a safe word with her family, Samantha Heg-Seth, to indicate if she was

in danger at home. And so at one point, this word was texted. And part of the problem, Charles, yes, was the brown liquid. So it's a very, very ugly series of allegations that essentially got ignored during the course this process. But there's another thing that's come out too, which is really quite extraordinary, which is a little while ago, in fact, this was reported on Friday. There were photos of him kind of working out with other, you know, the sort of military base

and so on. And there's some pictures of his arm. And on his arm, he has a tattoo in Arabic saying kathir, which is unbeliever. And this is a word that's been weaponised by people like the proud boys who have the same tattoo, basically rubbing it in the face of Muslims. To be so anti-Muslim that you would go to the point of having unbeliever tattooed on your bicep, it's pretty extreme. I'm not sure if I was a Muslim member of the US Armed Forces and I'd be going,

this guy's going to stick up for me no matter what. No, exactly. And look, I think one of the interesting things about the scandal is it's being treated as a sort of political football at the moment, right, where Trump's gone around pretending that he might sack Mike Waltz who accidentally did the, you know, adding of the group chat and things like that. He did try and say it was a staffer initially. Yeah, right. Okay. And then that goes, why are you giving your staff as access to your confidential signal shafts?

Yeah, that's exactly a great defense. So, but the thing is, but there's a sort of actual reality story here as well. Like, quite aside from the politics of it, which came out, which is, which is. Apparently, the fighter pilots who were being talked about in the script chat are really pissed off. Because if that had somehow leaked to the Houthis and the Yemenis or any sort of adversary, like in the future, like, who knows what's going to leak out or be treated with carelessness? If you don't have any consequences about that, there's actually just the real thing of, we want to go and bomb these people.

we want to kill them. Can we trust that our side is not going to leak the details so that we can go and get a nice clean run at these innocent people who are being, you know, being bombed? So the Houthi rebels in Yemen had very advanced weaponry. That's one of the reasons they're such a problem. That's why the Americans are bombing them because Europeans, I mean, if you look at the group chat,

they're Europeans haven't been able to contain them. Yes. And because they have very sophisticated surface-to-air missiles given to them by Iran. So they could have potentially used them on the US fighter planes if they'd known they were coming, but also to add more complexity to it, Charles. One of the participants in the chat was in Russia.

But yes, it wasn't like they were all texting amongst themselves just in America. They were spread out across the world. There was a few in America. There was one in Azerbaijan. Who was in Azerbaijan? There was, oh, I don't know, some, I don't know, the Secretary of Agriculture's.

I don't know, who cares? But there was one in the biggest adversary of the US Oh, really? Canada. Oh, my God. They're in Canada. Oh, the Canadians could easily have penetrated. That couldn't it? Yeah.

Well, there are several of them are in Saudi Arabia. And Whitkoff was in Moscow, the envoy. And the point being, we know that the Russians have penetrated signal. That's just very well known. Well, they used to have report a few months ago that there was a zero-day bug in signal for a little while. So they had the thing where, you know, it's something with WhatsApp, where you can get another device. Yeah. I'm sort of sitting on it.

But I don't think we should be worried. about the Russians anymore, aren't they allies with the US? They probably were on the group chat, but included on purpose. And anyway, and also, when of the Saudis ever harmed somebody? Well, I mean, I think that's why Jeffrey Goldberg left the chat as a journalist, I think. As a journalist. Yeah, you want to keep your head on. Has he ever works for the Washington Post?

Because, you know. So the point being, if in the next couple of days you're on signal or something, and I've made sure I'm on signal, I am on signal now, if you get asked to join a chat by the US National Security Advisor, it's probably not him. But anyone else, if it looks like from the Trump administration, by all means, join away. It could be very interesting. It could make you very famous.

But if you do get a request, it seems to be from Anthony Almanese or Petty Dutton, definitely decline that chat because it could be real. You could be bored to death. We are part of the Iconicles network. See you. We'll catch you next time. Either on the podcast, I will just slide into your group chat. Thank you for your patience.

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