Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees who spoke with NBC News.
Two of those people said that on more than a dozen occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before he went on air. Those same two people, plus another, said that during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.
One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall.
None of the sources with whom NBC News has spoken could recall an instance in which Hegseth missed a scheduled appearance because he’d been drinking.
"Everyone would be talking about it behind the scenes before he went on the air,” one of the former Fox employees said.
On Sunday night, the New Yorker detailed concerns about Hegseth’s drinking at two jobs he held at veterans’ nonprofits before joining Fox. “A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity — to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events,” the magazine reported.
According to the New Yorker, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, responded: “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. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”
This account of Hegseth’s time at Fox News is based on NBC News interviews with three current and seven former Fox employees, all of whom asked not to be named due to fear of retaliation.
Three current employees said that his drinking remained a concern up until Trump announced him as his choice to run the Pentagon, at which point Hegseth left Fox.
“He’s such a charming guy, but he just acted like the rules didn’t apply to him,” one of the former employees said.
A spokesperson for the Trump transition team said: “These disgusting allegations are completely unfounded and false, and anyone peddling these defamatory lies to score political cheap shots is sickening. As a decorated combat veteran, Pete has never done anything to jeopardize that, and he is treating his nomination as the most important deployment of his life.”
Parlatore, Hegseth's lawyer, referred NBC to the statement from the Trump transition spokesperson. Fox News did not respond to requests for comment.
Round-the-clock duties
The former colleagues’ descriptions of Hegseth’s behavior while he was employed at Fox News raise questions about his ability to carry out the round-the-clock duties involved in managing the Pentagon and its 3 million civilian and military employees.
A secretary of defense is generally working at all hours and might need to respond to a crisis that arises suddenly at night or on a weekend.
In February 2023, while traveling in Manila on the kind of trip that often requires socializing with other high-level officials, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was awakened at 3 a.m. local time for a phone call about a Chinese spy balloon flying over the continental U.S.
Similarly, the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel began around midnight Eastern Time.
And the Department of Defense is responsible for protecting U.S. cities and infrastructure from potential airborne threats similar to the 9/11 attacks. At any time, day or night, the secretary of defense might be called upon to decide whether a civilian aircraft should be shot down. The wrong decision either way could mean the death of innocent people.
“For the sake of national security, I really hope he has stopped drinking,” one of the former Fox employees said.
“He should not be secretary of defense,” another former Fox employee said. “His drinking should be disqualifying.”
In 1989, the Senate rejected then-President George H.W. Bush’s nominee to be defense secretary, former Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, in part over concerns about Tower’s history of drinking.
As a co-host, Hegseth needed to be at work early on weekend mornings. For a show that began at 6 a.m. ET, his female co-hosts would come in around 4 a.m. to prepare and have their hair and makeup done; male co-hosts typically arrived around 5 or 5:15 a.m., 45 minutes before they went on air, three sources said.
One current and two former Fox employees said they felt like they needed to “babysit” Hegseth due to his drinking and late nights. “We’d have to call him to make sure he didn’t oversleep because we knew he’d be out partying the night before,” one of them said. Another said, “Morning TV is stressful, and more times than not Pete made it even more stressful.”
Hegseth sometimes arrived with only 20 minutes or less before the show began, according to those three sources, stressing out his colleagues. They said Hegseth’s makeup would sometimes need to be done while he was on set because his late arrival left his colleagues with such a small amount of time. The sources could not say whether his lateness was caused solely by drinking.
The whistleblower report detailed in the New Yorker alleged repeated instances of Hegseth drinking heavily at work events, including a team outing to a strip club in Louisiana in November 2014 in which he became so inebriated that he “had to be restrained” from climbing on stage to dance with the strippers.
Hegseth drank heavily at some social events with Fox News colleagues as well, according to two former employees, with one of the former colleagues saying he would get “absolutely wasted.”
Last month, the Monterey California police department released records of a 2017 investigation into an accusation that Hegseth sexually assaulted a woman in a hotel room following a Republican women’s convention. The accuser, identified in the records as “Jane Doe,” believed someone may have slipped something into her drink.
Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing and he was never charged.
“This police report confirms what I’ve said all along,” Hegseth’s lawyer Parlatore told NBC News last month. “The incident was fully investigated and police found the allegation to be false, which is why no charges were filed.”
Hegseth has also confirmed that he paid the woman an undisclosed settlement. Parlatore previously told NBC News that Hegseth “ultimately decided to enter into a settlement for a significantly reduced amount” at the “height of the MeToo movement.” Parlatore also said that his client was “innocent collateral damage in a lie that the Complainant was holding onto to keep her marriage intact.”
