By any fair measure, Pete Hegseth’s new career as secretary of defense got off to a rough start. In the weeks immediately following his confirmation, the former Fox News host faced heckling and protests from military families at U.S. European Command headquarters; he made public comments that even Republicans panned as a “rookie mistake”; and he inexplicably brought a right-wing influencer and conspiracy theorist with him on an overseas trip.
But as the Republican settles in at the Pentagon, conditions are clearly getting worse, not better.
In the wake of his early stumbles, Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt offensive cyber operations and information operations against Russia. And made indefensible hires. And derailed the Defense Department’s efforts to take the climate crisis seriously. And shuttered the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s internal think tank for the last half-century that focused on long-term security threats.
But perhaps most important of all, Hegseth fired several key officials, including the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. The removal of three judge advocates general sent shockwaves through the military community and triggered a stunning New York Times op-ed from Frank Kendall, the former secretary of the Air Force.
“Our country is in uncharted territory,” Kendall wrote. “We have an administration that is waging war against the rule of law. The evidence is everywhere. We don’t yet know how far it will go as it seeks to control, reinterpret, rewrite, ignore or defy legal constraints, including the Constitution itself. The replacement of the military JAG leadership is one skirmish in that war, but it’s time for the American people, across the political spectrum, to recognize what is happening. America has a rogue president and a rogue administration, and we need to acknowledge that and respond.”
A couple of weeks after that piece was published, Hegseth began the process of replacing the JAG — and he started by hiring his own personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
If Parlatore’s name sounds at all familiar, it’s probably because he had another very high-profile client: Parlatore was part of Donald Trump’s legal defense team after the president was charged with multiple felonies in the classified documents/Mar-a-Lago scandal.
But as Jason Dempsey wrote for The Atlantic, that’s not what makes Hegseth’s decision notable.
[Parlatore’s appointment] reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.
The Guardian reported the controversial Pentagon chief is “expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict.” The report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the changes “are poised to have implications across the military, as Hegseth’s office considers changes to the interpretation of the US rules of engagement on the battlefield to the way that charges are brought under the military justice system.” It’s worth emphasizing for context that Hegseth suggested in one of his books that the U.S. military should disregard international human rights treaties, including the Geneva Conventions. In the same book — published just last year — he derided judge advocates general as “jagoffs” and, as the Times’ David French recently noted, “blamed them for restrictive rules of engagement and for war crimes prosecutions of American service members.” Fifty Senate Republicans voted to confirm Hegseth. With each new decision by the secretary, the scope and scale of those senators’ consequential misjudgment comes into sharper focus.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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