'Acted like the rules didn’t apply': Hegseth’s coworkers say he often showed up drunk on set

03 December 2024

Fox News personality Pete Hegseth — who President-elect Donald Trump has nominated to lead the Department of Defense — was known for showing up to work with alcohol on his breath and dealing with hangovers, according to some of his coworkers.

NBC News reported Tuesday evening that 10 people who have worked with Hegseth are now speaking out about the potential new defense secretary's propensity for heavy drinking, and his pattern of showing up to work intoxicated. Two of Hegseth's coworkers on the set of Fox & Friends Weekend — which begins at 6 AM — recalled how he would reek of alcohol and complain about having hangovers. He also reportedly smelled like alcohol and talked about being hung over as recently as this fall, according to one of NBC's sources.

"He’s such a charming guy, but he just acted like the rules didn’t apply to him," one former coworker said of Hegseth.

As the top civilian overseeing the U.S. military (next to the commander-in-chief), a defense secretary is expected to be on the clock 24 hours a day to respond to unfolding crises around the world. NBC noted that current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was awakened by a 3 AM phone call alerting him about a Chinese spy balloon flying over the United States. He was also expected to closely follow Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack on Israel as it unfolded in the early morning hours.

One former Fox employee said Hegseth's alcohol problem "should be disqualifying," adding that he "should not be secretary of defense." Another one said: "For the sake of national security, I really hope he has stopped drinking."

And according to one current and two former employees of the network, Hegseth would often need someone to "babysit" him and make sure he arrived to the set on time. One of his former colleagues told NBC: "We’d have to call him to make sure he didn’t oversleep because we knew he’d be out partying the night before."

"Morning TV is stressful, and more times than not Pete made it even more stressful," another remarked.

As the New Yorker's Jane Meyer reported, Hegseth was also known for abusing alcohol at his former job, when he was president of the Koch-funded group Concerned Veterans for America. In 2014, he took several coworkers to a Louisiana strip club and reportedly became so inebriated that his coworkers had to drag him off the stage when he tried to dance with the strippers. In 2015, during a trip to Cuyahoga County, Ohio, he reportedly got drunk and chanted "kill all Muslims" at a Sheraton Hotel bar.

Former Fox News contributor and Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky also referenced Hegseth's alleged drinking to excess during a November interview on CNN. She made the comment while discussing a police report that emerged in which a woman at a Republican conference in 2017 accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her.

"Listen, I worked with Pete Hegseth at Fox and, let me tell you something, Pete Hegseth has issues above and beyond this that need to be examined," Roginsky said, "because Pete Hegseth has a problem where he goes out and gets drunk, and that's also not something that we need necessarily need in our Department of Defense, and the person leading our military.

Click here to read NBC's report in its entirety.

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