Nicolle Wallace wondered how long Pete Hegseth will last as U.S. Secretary of War after the double-tap boat strike controversy and Signalgate, given she’s not sure “how much more embarrassment” the president will tolerate.
The MS Now host weighed in on Hegseth’s scandals during Wednesday’s episode of “Deadline: White House,” where Wallace ripped into Hegseth for distancing himself from the boat-strike controversy, which has sparked war crimes concerns.
“Pete Hegseth at Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting seemed to endeavor to further embarrass himself with Hegseth claiming, ‘Hey, I wasn’t even in the room for that second boat strike,’” she stated, “which was not exactly the impression he left with his former colleagues at Fox News, when he went on their airwaves the day after the strike took place.”
Wallace then laid into Hegseth following the Pentagon’s review into his use of Signal.
“Signalgate. It was a massive national security breach,” Wallace said. “It was made possible entirely by the sloppy and haphazard nature of Donald Trump’s national security team when they shared national security information, including war plans.”
She continued: “That report says that Pete Hegseth shared information in that Signal chat. Information — that put mission operations and servicemen and women at risk — about a pending military operation in Yemen that took place in March of this year. The defense department’s inspector general finds that, while the mission ultimately was not jeopardized, Pete Hegseth violated his department’s own policies when he used Signal, a commercial messaging app hat is not approved for sharing classified information.”
However, the White House has stood by Hegseth, with the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson even calling the report a “exoneration” of the Secretary of War.
“It’s important to remember that if anybody did this who was not named Pete Hegseth,” Wallace sounded off, “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.”
Wallace further blasted the scandals as “an embarrassment not only for the nation that the military serves, [but] for the men and women in it, and for its commander-in-chief, frankly, Donald Trump.
“And it calls into question just how much more embarrassment Donald Trump is going to tolerate,” she added, “from his handpicked, bipartisanly opposed Secretary of Defense.”
Watch Wallace’s full commentary above.
“Deadline: White House” airs weekdays at 4 p.m. ET on MS Now.
