Republican Rep. Don Bacon said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “poor decision-making” on Signalgate, the departure of legacy journalists in the Pentagon and his position on Ukraine joining NATO have “ruined his credibility.”
Joining Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna on C-SPAN’s Ceasefire, set to air Friday evening, Bacon expressed disappointment in Hegseth’s job performance over the last few months and renewed criticism against him. Pressure has been mounting on the Defense Secretary over legally contentious airstrikes on alleged drug dealers that have left more than 80 people dead.
“After Signalgate, I’ve seen enough,” Bacon said.
“What I really wanted to see was someone take responsibility, own up to a mistake. And when he blamed the media, or the journalist for the story, it ruined his credibility,” Bacon said, citing the incident in which The Atlantic editor was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat in which Hegseth and other senior Trump administration figures discussed an imminent military strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The Republican representative also railed against Hegseth’s handling of Signalgate on CNN Thursday, after the administration claimed that the Inspector General’s office report on the incident had exonerated Hegseth.
“That is total baloney,” Bacon said during the interview. “I read the report and what I saw, what had happened was wrong, but the report makes clear that the secretary put sensitive information that would ordinarily be classified.”
The report concluded that Hegseth did not share classified information because, as defense secretary, he can declassify information. It contended, however, that Hegseth did violate security protocols and shared highly sensitive information that could have endangered U.S. troops on an unsecure platform.
On C-SPAN, Bacon said Hegseth had a record of “poor decision-making” – such as removing legacy journalists from the Pentagon’s press pool by issuing new rules that media outlets felt ethically unable to comply with and replacing them with “second-rate journalists.”
He also cited Hegseth’s position on Ukraine not joining NATO as another disappointment.
The Defense Secretary said earlier this year that the U.S. doesn’t support Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.
Bacon’s criticisms of Hegseth arrive as the defense secretary faces new concerns from lawmakers over the Pentagon’s lethal boat strikes against alleged drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean – something that Bacon has also raised concerns about.
Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, said he was “troubled” by the report, but he also does not believe Hegseth gave a kill-all order, as first reported by the Washington Post.
