Even Fox News has turned to Trump’s garbage defense pick

Not even Fox News accepts MAGA Republicans’ attempts to discredit allegations against Pete Hegseth without challenge.

In an interview on Monday, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall was defending Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary when Fox host John Roberts asked him rather vaguely “about concerns about things that have happened in the past.”

Hegseth is currently facing a number of scandals: He was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017. (Hegseth was not charged, but did pay the woman a financial settlement.) His drinking habits as co-host of Fox & friends He reportedly worried his Fox News colleagues. The New Yorker She recently covered a whistleblower report that detailed Hegseth’s excessive drinking and financial mismanagement while leading a nonprofit veterans organization.

“Yeah, look. I think Pete is a good man,” Marshall said. “He is now a man of integrity. He absolutely has my support. I think that these anonymous character assassinations are being reported far too much by the media…”

“But some of them weren’t anonymous,” Roberts interrupted.

“Well, the ones I’ve seen are anonymous,” Marshall said, before diverting the subject from Hegseth’s scandals.

Marshall’s emphasis on the anonymity of the allegations echoes similar defenses of Hegseth by Senators Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott, who last week sought to minimize the allegations plaguing Hegseth by pointing to their anonymous sources.

To address this, MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin wrote a blog post last week noting that anonymous sources are essential to the functioning of the free press. The identities of anonymous sources are ultimately “known to the journalists who reported on them” and the allegations are independently verified or confirmed.

“And of course,” Rubin wrote, “at least one of the anonymous people mentioned in the reporting about Hegseth is not anonymous to Hegseth: the Jane Doe who accused him of rape and with whom he signed a plea agreement.”

Nor do all of the revelations against Hegseth come from anonymous sources. As The New York Times As reported last month, Hegseth’s mother called her son a “woman abuser” in a private email in 2018, whose “years of abuse of women (dishonesty, sneaking around, betrayal, humiliation, degradation) must be denounced.” him that she now denies.

Hegseth was back on Capitol Hill Monday, continuing his efforts to save his nomination by meeting with the senators who hold his fate in their hands.