MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace tore into Pete Hegseth on Wednesday’s “Deadline: White House,” telling viewers, “If it is a day that ends in the letter y, it is another scandal day engulfing Donald Trump’s secretary of defense.”
According to Hegseth, Adm. Frank Bradley was the commander who ordered the military to strike a suspected drug boat a second time, killing two survivors of the initial strike. The secretary of defense now says he was not present for that second strike, despite previously boasting during an interview on Fox News that he had witnessed the operation.
Wallace ripped Hegseth and the Trump White House over their attempts to tamp down the growing scandal. The MS NOW host said the controversy is “a full-circle moment” for Hegseth and the administration, referring to an earlier scandal involving the defense secretary.
In March, Hegseth sent sensitive military information about a planned military strike in Yemen to a group chat that mistakenly included a reporter.
“It was a massive national security breach,” Wallace said of the incident. “It was made possible entirely by the sloppy and haphazard nature of Donald Trump’s national security team.”
“It’s important to remember that if anybody did this who was not named Pete Hegseth — like any of the men and women farther down the chain of command — those men and women would be thrown out of the military and almost certainly face criminal prosecution, maybe even worse,” she added.
Wallace said the fact that Hegseth has faced few consequences for his repeated irresponsible conduct is likely to create an “impression among the military rank and file that there are two sets of rules: one for the Defense Department’s presidentially appointed leadership and one for everybody else.”
“It’s also an embarrassment — for the nation that the military serves, for the men and women in it and for its commander in chief, frankly,” she added.
As Hegseth’s scandals pile up, Wallace said the question for the administration has become “just how much more embarrassment Donald Trump is going to tolerate from his handpicked, bipartisanly opposed secretary of defense?”
You can watch Wallace’s full analysis in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.