Trump’s Defense pick, Pete Hegseth, faces new media report on alleged alcohol abuse, sexual impropriety

Pete Hegseth, the already embattled choice of President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Pentagon, faces a new magazine report detailing his alleged alcohol abuse, sexual impropriety, and mismanagement while he was running two veterans’ nonprofit groups.

The report, published late Sunday by The New Yorker, citing a previously undisclosed whistleblower complaint written in 2015, said Hegseth was drunk on repeated occasions while acting as president of the Concerned Veterans for America “to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.”

“At one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team,” The New Yorker reported, citing the whistleblower report, which the magazine said was compiled by several former CVA employees and sent to the group’s senior management.

“The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups — the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls,'” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote.

CNBC has not seen the whistleblower report nor a separate letter of complaint detailed by the magazine.

Hegseth was forced to step down as president of CVA in 2016 in part due to “concerns about his mismanagement and abuse of alcohol on the job,” the magazine said, citing what it called three knowledgeable sources, one of whom contributed to the whistleblower report.

The article says that another group that Hegseth previously led, Vets for Freedom, under his leadership “soon ran up enormous debt” and by the end of 2008 “was unable to pay its creditors.”

The magazine reported that VFF’s finances “grew so dire that the group’s donors hatched a plan to take control away from Hegseth.”  

Hegseth’s job title was downgraded on annual tax filings by VFF, and his compensation was reduced, until he left by 2012, according to The New Yorker.

CNBC has requested comment from Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, who earlier declined to comment to NBC News.

The New Yorker quoted a statement provided to the magazine by Parlatore, who said it came from a person the attorney identified as an advisor to Hegseth.

“We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s,” that statement said. “Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”

Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC on The New Yorker article.

Hegseth, a decorated U.S. military veteran who most recently worked as a host on Fox News, was tapped by Trump in November to be the next secretary of the Defense Department.

His planned nomination almost immediately came under fire, after revelations that police in Monterey, California, investigated Hegseth for an alleged sexual assault of a woman in October 2017 at a hotel where a Republican women’s convention was being held.

Hegseth, who told police he had consensual sex with the woman, was not criminally charged after that probe.

He told reporters on Capitol Hill on Nov. 21: “As far as the media is concerned, I’ll keep this very simple. The matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared, and that’s where I’m going to leave it.”

At the time of the 2017 incident, Hegseth was in the midst of a divorce from his second wife. Two months before the alleged assault, his current wife, with whom he was involved in an extramarital relationship at the time, gave birth to a baby fathered by Hegseth.

The Monterey County district attorney in a statement in late November said her office declined to file criminal charges against Hegseth in January 2018 because “no charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Several years after the alleged incident, Hegseth paid the woman an undisclosed sum of money “as part of a civil confidential settlement and maintains his innocence,” Parlatore said in mid-November.

Hegseth’s attorney told NBC News at the time that Hegseth “ultimately decided to enter into a settlement for a significantly reduced amount” at the “height of the MeToo movement.” 

The police report on the sexual assault probe, which was made public in November, said investigators spoke with a hotel worker who saw Hegseth and the accuser at a pool after two separate guests complained of a loud disturbance.

The worker “stated Hegseth was very intoxicated” and that the woman he was with “was not intoxicated … and was very coherent,” the police report said.

However, the woman later told police that she was unable to recall much of what happened when she went with Hegseth to his room.

She “believes something might have been slipped into her drink, as she cannot remember most of the night’s events,” police wrote in their report.

Correction: Pete Hegseth was previously president of the Concerned Veterans for America nonprofit group. An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the group.