Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Sean Parnell speaks to students U.S. Senate Youth Program at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., March 7, 2025. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Madelyn Keech)
Multiple former officials during President Donald Trump's administration and those who work on Capitol Hill are attacking Sean Parnell for lying in a biography.
Parnell, a senior Pentagon official, is being considered for secretary of the U.S. Army. According to Politico's "Playbook," Parnell's Pentagon bio says “he played a pivotal role in the passage of the MISSION Act,” a bill intended to give veterans health care options that Trump signed in 2018.
According to five former Trump administration officials, one current and one former Capitol Hill staffer involved in passing the bill, Parnell had "no direct role" in getting the bill passed. In fact, one former official called it "simply false."
The MISSION Act was the 2018 measure to reform the Veterans Administration during Trump's first term.
According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Parnell helped draft the bill's language and met with members of Congress and veterans across the U.S.
Parnell is also facing accusations from his ex-wife, Laurie Snell, who testified that he had an affair, that he was "tracking" her and that he also sent "harassing" text messages.
While trying to coordinate a visit for their daughter's birthday, he called her “a liar and a manipulative sociopath,” as well as “erratic."
Reading the text messages aloud in court, she said that she asked him to stop saying such “mean, awful things.”
He told her, “no one is bullying you at all,” she said.
She also alleged that “[Parnell] tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him” to get free, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time.
“He was strangling me,” she said. She cited some of the profane names that he called her. She also told the press that he slapped one of the children hard enough to leave marks through their child's shirt.
Parnell called the accusations false.
Parnell also faces criticism from tighter Pentagon press restrictions, which critics argue curb independent scrutiny. After a federal judge struck down major parts of the Pentagon’s earlier policy in March restricting the press, Parnell signed the replacement rules that ultimately closed the longtime "Correspondents' Corridor," moved reporters to an outside annex and mandated that journalists be escorted in the Pentagon. He has said that these are all due to national security. The Pentagon has appealed the court rulings.