Secretary of Embarrassment: Mr. Ethos Goes to Washington

If you were looking for a great choice for a terrible Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth was always your man. It was entirely unsurprising that President Donald Trump picked him. No rational person could want Hegseth anywhere near America's chain of command, and it's unclear that any rational person ever has.

For starters, there was highly credible evidence, including from his former Fox News colleagues, that the out-of-central-casting bro drank excessively, to the point of open intoxication. There was the 2017 accusation that he had sexually assaulted a woman, and the $50,000 payment he made to her to stay silent about it. There was the sworn testimony by his former sister-in-law that his ex-wife hid in fear from him.

But the GOP-controlled Senate, thanks to the Trump-controlled GOP, approved him as Secretary of Defense, a position which he has now renamed Secretary of War.

What could go wrong?

So far, a lot.

Shortly after taking office, Hegseth used Signal, a commercially available, widely accessible app, to circulate in advance the schedule of planned American military attacks against Houthi positions in Yemen. In a triumph of meticulousness, he sent the information to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who received it incredulously while sitting in his car in a parking lot. When Goldberg published the texts, Hegseth, not the world's straightest shooter, denied that he had done anything remotely wrong, instead accusing Goldberg of being "deceitful" and a "peddler of garbage."

The only peddler of garbage, of course, was Hegseth. His own Department's Inspector General concluded last week that Hegseth violated Defense Department regulations. "The Secretary," his report found, "sent non-public DoD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned US aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecured network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes. Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send non-public DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives."

"Total exoneration," proclaimed Hegseth dishonestly after his own Department's IG found that Mr. National Defense had compromised the safety of our troops.

To the pile of evidence of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, reckless endangerment of American military forces and promiscuous falsehoods must now be added jaw-dropping hypocrisy. After several Democratic lawmakers who had served in our military reminded American servicemen and women that they did not have to follow orders that violated the Constitution or the law, Hegseth called the lawmakers "seditious." This was Hegseth dutifully echoing the comments of President Trump, who famously avoided military service during the Vietnam War by claiming to suffer from "bone spurs." The Old Draft Dodger had called for the lawmakers to "be arrested and put on trial" for "seditious behavior" that "could be punishable by death."

It didn't take long for a clip to surface of Hegseth saying precisely the same thing as those military veterans he accused of "sedition." "I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes," Hegseth said in 2016, when former President Barack Obama was in office. "If you're doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That's why the military said it won't follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief. There's a standard, there's an ethos, there's a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do."

But, hey, let me just call people "seditious" for saying the same things I said.

Speaking of "war crimes" and "unlawful" conduct, there's a real question pending whether Hegseth or those following his orders engaged in just such activities. The September missile strike Hegseth ordered against a boat allegedly carrying narco-traffickers in the Caribbean left two survivors clinging desperately to the boat's obliterated remains. Despite well-established laws of war prohibiting the targeting of the incapacitated, either Hegseth or his subordinate ordered that the survivors be killed. This may well have constituted war crimes, an issue now under Congressional review. And since the only thing you can bank on about Hegseth is that you can't bank on a word he says, it's anyone's guess what that review will disclose.

A year into his tenure as Secretary, Pete Hegseth has been worse than a national embarrassment. And consider this: we've got three years to go.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.