‘FAKE NEWS’: Pete Hegseth’s Former Colleagues Speak Out Against Corporate Media Smears
Bradley Devlin /
Editor’s note: This article uses the generic “he” to refer to all sources who requested anonymity, but this use doesn’t necessarily mean the person cited is a man.
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News Channel host and veterans advocate who is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, has been hard at work on Capitol Hill seeking to persuade Republican senators to support his confirmation.
His fellow soldiers, veterans who worked with Hegseth at Concerned Veterans for America, have his back. Speaking exclusively to The Daily Signal, several of Hegseth’s former colleagues at CVA are refuting allegations that stem from his time at the helm of the veterans advocacy organization.
For the embattled nominee, a series of allegations ranging from workplace misconduct to sexual assault has sidetracked the Senate confirmation process, forcing Hegseth to defend himself rather than discuss how he would defend the United States of America.
Sean Parnell, a former airborne Army Ranger, was a senior adviser to Concerned Veterans of America and worked alongside Hegseth daily from 2013 to 2016.
“They are completely untrue,” Parnell told The Daily Signal of the allegations about Hegseth’s tenure at and departure from CVA.
Before joining Fox News, Hegseth was CEO of Concerned Veterans for America—one of the nation’s most prominent veterans advocacy groups—from 2013 to 2016. He reached the rank of major in the Army National Guard after serving in Iraq and then Afghanistan.
Since Hegseth, 44, became Trump’s nominee to oversee the Defense Department, corporate media outlets have run with allegations that while at CVA, he fostered a toxic work environment, was frequently intoxicated on the job, engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct, and financially mismanaged the organization.
The culmination of these factors, these stories claim, led to Hegseth’s ousting in 2016.
Parnell and other colleagues from Hegseth’s time at CVA, however, told The Daily Signal that these stories are completely untrue.
One former employee, who also worked closely with Hegseth every day throughout the nominee’s tenure, told The Daily Signal that he never saw or heard that Hegseth was acting inappropriately in the workplace.
This person said he “attended hundreds of meetings, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, and dozens of events with Pete, and never saw any misbehavior.”
Given how closely he worked with Hegseth, the source told The Daily Signal, “what they accuse Pete of simply didn’t happen.”
Hegseth’s Crucial Leadership at Concerned Veterans for America During Critical Juncture
Hegseth led Concerned Veterans for America while matters involving veterans were among the top issues for Washington policymakers in light of the 2014 scandal at the Department of Veteran Affairs during the Obama administration.
In that scandal, the VA was accused of falsifying appointment records to meet requirements to see patients within 14 days, thereby hiding extremely long waitlist times for veterans to receive critical health care.
In April 2014, CNN reported that 40 veterans had died while waiting for care at VA facilities in Phoenix. That June, the VA’s internal investigation identified at least 35 veterans who had died waiting for care in the Phoenix system.
“When it became apparent to all of us [at CVA] that there was a secret waitlist at the VA,” Parnell recalled of that period, “we knew we had to expose that whole scandal.”
“It was really Pete’s leadership at that critical moment and his presence in the media that really shifted the needle from a cultural standpoint to help hold the VA accountable,” Parnell told The Daily Signal.
The VA health care scandal wasn’t isolated to Phoenix. The problems were systemic. An audit of the VA found in June 2014 that more than 120,000 veterans were stuck on waitlists or didn’t receive medical care.
“The first step was to get the VA to admit that they did have a secret waitlist, because their first instinct was to say, ‘No, we don’t have any problems. There’s no backlog,’” Parnell said. “That was just completely bogus, and it was Pete relentlessly beating the drum every day in the media that helped expose all of it.”
In May 2014, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, a retired Army general appointed by President Barack Obama, resigned in shame. CVA, under Hegseth’s leadership, was instrumental in Shinseki’s ousting.
A CNN report one week before Shinseki’s resignation noted that “two key veterans groups call for VA chief Eric Shinseki to resign.” The groups in question: The American Legion and Concerned Veterans for America.
“We’re proud to stand with The American Legion as they take this courageous and historic stand,” Hegseth told CNN at the time. “As America’s largest veterans organization, their moral authority on this issue is unimpeachable. We applaud their demands for accountability at the very top of the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
Under Hegseth’s leadership, CVA was a leading voice in policy debates to reform the VA. The organization unveiled its suggested reforms in early 2015 with two goals in mind: First, increase the quality of care received at VA facilities. Second, provide veterans more choice in health care.
To do so, Concerned Veterans for America proposed allowing veterans to have VA-sponsored health insurance for care in the private sector. This change would alleviate pressure on overburdened VA health care facilities while giving veterans more control over their own medical care, CVA argued.
CVA’s plan received high marks from media outlets. The Arizona Republic was one publication on the front lines of the VA health care scandal, given its Phoenix origins, and the newspaper’s editorial board came out in favor of CVA’s reforms.
The publication also criticized Obama for leaving CVA out of roundtable discussions about reforms during a visit to the VA’s Phoenix system.
Nevertheless, CVA was a major player in Congress’ passing the VA Accountability Act of 2014, which sought to increase veterans’ health care choices. Critics, however, said the new law ended up being poorly enforced by the Obama administration.
“Through his hard work, his credibility, his determination, his articulation of the issues, and by putting together the right team, he laid the groundwork for policy wins,” one former CVA employee who overlapped with Hegseth’s tenure said. “Honestly, it was probably the time in my career when I felt the most like we are a well-oiled machine—doing serious stuff and changing the conversation.”
Trump, who made the government’s treatment of veterans a major campaign issue in 2016, brought several CVA members into his administration.
Hegseth was floated as a potential Trump nominee for VA secretary in Trump’s first term. CVA worked closely with the Trump administration to improve veterans’ health care choices and outcomes, given the Obama administration’s poor enforcement of the new VA Accountability and Choice Act.
Trump signed two major pieces of veterans legislation into law during his first term. The first, the VA Accountability Act of 2017, gave the Department of Veterans Affairs more latitude to fire poor-performing employees. The second, the VA Mission Act, transformed the VA to increase veterans’ health care options by creating a structure akin to the military’s Tricare insurance system.
Mark Lucas, Hegseth’s successor at CVA, argues that Hegseth’s leadership was integral to VA reform.
Lucas told The Daily Signal about a briefing he had with Trump shortly after taking the reins at CVA.
“I briefed President Trump on CVA’s plan to reform the VA in our conversation in front of all these veteran service organizations,” Lucas recalled. “I told him that Pete Hegseth was my predecessor, and Trump’s eyes lit up and he said, ‘You know Pete? I love Pete! I wanted to hire Pete!”
Hegseth’s established rapport “helped me immensely with President Trump,” Lucas said. “Trump took my comments very seriously and the staff in the room did.”
Ultimately, he said, Trump and Congress adopted “many of the policy priorities that Pete Hegseth had been advocating for years.”
“I did not inherit a train wreck,” Lucas went on. “I inherited an organization that was poised to pass two of the most historic reforms in the VA’s history.”
“Pete Hegseth had the vision; he built a grassroots army. And we wouldn’t have been able to do all of that without Pete Hegseth,” Lucas said.
Dan Caldwell, a public policy adviser at Defense Priorities, also praised Hegseth. A former CVA executive director, Caldwell was there when Hegseth was at the helm.
“Pete and the CVA team saw the problems at the VA continuing to get worse, and saw that most of the major veteran organizations were not taking those problems seriously,” Caldwell told The Daily Signal. “He made a strategic decision to position CVA as the group that was going to hold the VA accountable and also propose real reforms to the VA, which would fix the systemic problems within the organization. Pete and the CVA team zeroed in on accountability and choice as the key reforms.”
“Pete assembled a very strong, knowledgeable team to drive really detailed, systemic reforms, many of which found their way into law with the VA Mission Act and the VA Accountability Act,” Caldwell added.
Lucas cited the sheer size of the Department of Veterans Affairs in supporting Hegseth’s nomination to lead the Department of Defense.
“The VA is one of the largest bureaucracies in the federal government, right behind DOD. They have a massive budget with a massive staff and with facilities all across the country,” Lucas explained. “The bigger point is that Pete had the vision that helped reform the VA under President Trump, and now he’s going to take that same acumen and apply it to the DOD.”
“It’s important to look at what Pete was able to do from a strategic perspective at the VA, and I think it will translate extremely well to DOD,” he said.
Former Colleagues Rebut Allegations Against Hegseth
Because of Concerned Veterans for America’s advocacy in this pivotal period, the organization grew quickly. Ultimately, Hegseth was in charge of CVA’s more than 100 full- and part-time employees.
Like any CEO, Hegseth was forced at points to fire poor-performing employees or employees who no longer were needed.
One source with intimate knowledge of the matter says that the allegations against Hegseth in the media likely stem from three former CVA employees, each of whom Hegseth fired—two men and one woman. Other sources with ties to CVA concurred with this assessment.
The Daily Signal asked its sources whether Hegseth had, or was rumored to have, a romantic relationship with the female employee. The answer was a resounding no.
One person argued that since Hegseth’s departure from CVA in 2016, these aggrieved employees have attempted to damage his reputation in the press. The corporate media is now interested in delving deep into these stories because of Trump’s nomination of Hegseth to run the Pentagon, this person said.
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wrote one such report. In her story for the magazine, Mayer alleged: “A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”
Mayer’s report relies heavily on anonymous sourcing. In fact, not a single source who accused Hegseth of impropriety went on record. Nor does Mayer publish documents alongside her reporting, instead pulling only the occasional quote.
A seven-page “whistleblower report” sent to CVA’s senior leadership in February 2015 accused Hegseth of these types of impropriety. The allegations involve CVA events held between 2013 and 2015 amid the organization’s “Defend Freedom” tour.
Hegseth’s supposed drunkenness traveled with him and CVA across the country.
The most salacious accusations against Hegseth from his time at CVA stem from a November 2014 trip to Louisiana, where he allegedly took his team to a strip club and had to be restrained from joining dancers onstage.
Parnell said the allegations that Hegseth took CVA staffers to a strip club were “ridiculous.”
“The New Yorker article cited the Louisiana trip and claimed that there was some strip club,” he told The Daily Signal.
He would have known “if there was a strip club,” Parnell said. “There was not. This did not happen.”
“I never had the sense that that was an issue,” another former CVA employee told The Daily Signal of the allegations made in The New Yorker. “I never saw anything like that. Categorically, no.”
“I went on those tours,” another person at CVA under Hegseth’s leadership told The Daily Signal. “I was on the very first tour in 2012. I went on those tours in 2013, 2014, and never ever saw that. And trust me, if he had done that and he had a hangover the next day, I would have known.”
“I never saw him drink to excess,” this person reiterated, adding that when he saw the anti-Hegseth headlines, “I just thought, this is fake news.”
Tim Unes is founder and president of Event Strategies Inc., a Republican event management and production company that put on events hosted by Hegseth for CVA.
Unes said his company put on “just shy of 100 events over four years,” or one event nearly every two weeks.
“When you host almost 100 events together, you get to know people pretty well,” Unes said. “I never saw Pete misbehave even once.”
The allegation that angered Unes the most was that Hegseth was drunk on the job.
“Someone said that he was going onstage—anonymously, of course—after he had been drinking,” Unes said. “Whoever that is, if that person’s willing to, you know, come out, I will debate them. And the reason I say that is because I own the company, I’m always the stage manager. I’m always the last person to speak to Pete, or whomever the principal is, before they go onstage.”
“It’s a very tight area backstage,” Unes added. “It’s a practical impossibility for Pete to be drunk and me not to know it, or even to have been drinking and me not to have known it.”
While backstage for every event his company puts on, he explained, “I am leaning in to whisper the latest instructions to [the client] or whatever changes might happen.”
“I’m next to him and I can absolutely tell you, not once was Pete ever drinking,” Unes said.
Unes said he didn’t see Hegseth get drunk elsewhere either.
“I’ve never seen him intoxicated,” Unes said. “I’ve been out to dinner with him, I’ve been in the hotel—if that sort of behavior were taking place, I would know about it.”
“No one gets away with that s**t,” he added. “And I’m telling you, I never saw Pete do anything that I thought was inappropriate, or that bothered me, or that I thought was wrong at all.”
“When they want to sideline somebody, this is what they do,” added the person who went on tour with Hegseth. “And I thought to myself, ‘I was there. I would have known. This didn’t happen.’”
“They’re trying to get after Pete because he’s going to be a disrupter,” this source added. “And swamp doesn’t like disruptors.”
“I read that New Yorker article from Jane Mayer, and I don’t expect a lot from the media,” Parnell said. “I certainly don’t expect the truth from much of the mainstream or corporate media at all. But everything contained in that article was just completely false—there’s really no other way to say it.”
“It’s really important for people, especially people as a part of CVA, to speak out about this, because Pete is a great guy,” Parnell said.
“He was, is, articulate and certainly had the experience to back it up. Everybody respected him,” another former CVA employee said of Hegseth.
The Daily Signal’s previous reporting put other former staff members of Concerned Veterans for America on the record saying that the accusations against Hegseth are false.
“During my time with CVA [October 2014 to December 2016], I frequently traveled to ‘Defend Freedom’ tour stops, policymaker town halls, and various other events,” Holly K. Talley said. “I personally never witnessed any unprofessional or inappropriate behavior by Pete during these events.”
“What The New Yorker published could not be further from the truth!” exclaimed Tina Kingston, CVA’s Louisiana state director from 2014 to 2016. “I never saw Pete Hegseth flirt or do anything inappropriate with his female staffers or any other female.”
Hegseth Didn’t Mismanage Finances as CEO of Concerned Veterans for America
A report by CBS News accusing Hegseth claimed that tax filings from 2012 to 2016 for Vets for Economic Freedom Trust, which operated as Concerned Veterans for America, testify to Hegseth’s alleged financial mismanagement.
“During three of the five years of his leadership,” the CBS News report reads, “the organization spent more money than it raised from donations and other means.”
According to CBS News, Concerned Veterans for America spent $130,000 more than it brought in during fiscal year 2013, a year in which Hegseth received $67,500 in compensation.
In fiscal 2014, although the group’s donations nearly quintupled to $15.7 million, the shortfall had grown to $428,000 because of $16.1 million in spending—$8.6 million of which went to advertising and promotion. Hegseth was compensated to the tune of $144,894.
Fiscal 2015 saw CVA run at a surplus for the first time since 2011. Budget shortfalls returned in fiscal 2016, the year Hegseth left.
Tax documents, CBS News reported, show that after Hegseth’s departure, Concerned Veterans for America quickly cut back expenditures. In fiscal 2017, CVA cut $5 million in salaries and wages, about $2 million in travel expenses, and over $2 million in events.
Despite allegedly leaving CVA in a strained financial position, CBS reported, Hegseth received a “six-figure severance” and signed a nondisclosure agreement.
CBS reported that tax filings show Hegseth received more than $172,000 in compensation from CVA between October 2016 and September 2017, although Hegseth departed in January 2016. He remained listed on these tax filings as a former CEO over this period.
Hegseth and his lawyers have not denied the amount of the severance package. Hegseth lawyer Timothy Parlatore told CBS News that Hegseth received a “standard severance package” for someone in his position.
As for the nondisclosure agreement?
“EVERYONE who leaves CVA sign[s] an NDA. It was standard for all employees. Not just Pete,” Parlatore said, the network reported.
“There was no financial mismanagement at CVA,” Parnell, the former senior adviser to the organization, told The Daily Signal. “There was no financial impropriety at CVA.”
CBS News also reported that the allegations in the 2015 whistleblower report originated from Jessie Jane Duff, a Marine veteran who worked for CVA before becoming an executive director of the 2024 Trump campaign and a Newsmax commentator.
Duff has supported the Hegseth nomination publicly but didn’t respond to a request from The Daily Signal for comment on the veracity of CBS News’ reporting or Hegseth’s confirmation prospects.
CBS reported that a source said the seven-page whistleblower report subsequently was sent to Fox News in an attempt to get Hegseth fired. A Fox News spokesperson, however, told CBS: “Fox News does not have any record of receiving this report.”
While Fox News denies ever having received the report, Randy Lair, a CVA trustee, went out of his way to write a letter to Fox News in January 2016—amid Hegseth’s departure from the veterans organization.
“We thought it was important to set the record straight given what appears to be a very personal attack against Pete and his military service,” Lair wrote to Fox. “The truth is Pete resigned his position as CEO of Concerned Veterans for America as a result of a difference of opinion as to the future of the organization and so that he could focus on other endeavors, including his relationship with Fox News.”
Lair’s bottom line: “Pete was not terminated by the organization.”
Furthermore, the spending cuts that followed Hegseth’s departure were part of a broad restructuring of the organization amid an even larger restructuring of nonprofits tied to the Koch network.
Freedom Partners, the top of the Koch brothers’ pyramid of political nonprofits, restructured the entire enterprise and cut over $100 million in spending across the network.
As part of the restructuring, CVA was placed more firmly under Americans for Prosperity. Nevertheless, those involved at CVA were and remained part of the Koch network.
Before and after the restructuring, however, CVA’s leadership remained answerable to boards and other guarantors. Hegseth didn’t have complete control of the purse strings at CVA in his capacity as CEO. He simply didn’t have the authority to engage in reckless spending that would endanger the financial stability of the organization.
One former CVA employee called the accusations that Hegseth mismanaged organization funds “total nonsense.”
“It’s important to understand that CVA had its own kind of board of directors,” this former employee told The Daily Signal. “Pete couldn’t just operate on his own. Pete just couldn’t spend money on his own. The way you get more money is that you go to the trustees, and donors give you more money to do specific things.”
After Hegseth left CVA, there was “a total reorganization of the whole Koch network,” this person said, adding that CVA “didn’t need as [many] expenditures because we had done such a good job under Pete.”
“We didn’t need to start over again,” he said. “We had a carryover effect.”
“After we exposed the VA secret waitlist stuff at CVA, the organization naturally shipped on to another mission. That required a different structure,” Parnell said. “The ‘Defend Freedom’ tour, which was expensive, started winding down, but because of Pete’s leadership, we had state directors now and grassroots in every single critical state across the country.”
“We didn’t need to be doing freedom tours,” Parnell added. “We had what we needed to have in place, and the resources that were allocated to CVA were better served elsewhere on new priorities.”
The Nature of Hegseth’s Departure From Concerned Veterans for America
“The entire narrative around Pete’s departure is completely bogus,” Parnell told The Daily Signal. “What it boiled down to was policy differences. Pete had a lot of other pokers in the fire—obviously, a gig with Fox News—but he left the organization because of policy differences.”
The article in The New Yorker, meanwhile, claimed that Hegseth had “no other job lined up at the time.”
Parnell said this isn’t true.
Hegseth “had a book coming out,” he said. “He had his relationship with Fox News, and he was also in talks with ABC at one point.”
The split, Parnell said, “was completely amicable.”
“Pete and I were both involved with the handover at CVA with Mark Lucas,” he said. “We met with [Lucas] in Washington to help set that up, and we were involved any time Mark had any questions or any of the executives at CVA had any questions.”
Lucas took over from Hegseth as leader of Concerned Veterans for America after Jae Pak’s interim stint. When The Daily Signal asked about the media claims that Hegseth had endangered CVA’s financial situation, Lucas replied: “Absolutely not. It was the complete opposite: It was world class.”
“It was very healthy financially,” Lucas said of Concerned Veterans for America. “I never had any financial concerns when I was the executive director of CVA.”
Lucas also credited CVA’s decreased expenditures after Hegseth left to the restructuring of the web of nonprofits affiliated with the Kochs.
“Pete is incredibly effective at casting a vision and then building a strategy and a team to implement that vision,” Defense Priorities Caldwell told The Daily Signal. “That is what he brought to CVA, and that’s what I hope he’ll bring to the Department of Defense.”
“It had nothing to do with drinking,” Parnell said of Hegseth’s departure from CVA. “It had nothing to do with a lack of leadership or financial impropriety or anything like that.”
“What’s happening now is … not just a smear of him, it’s a smear of every single veteran who served this country and worked for Concerned Veterans for America.”