An ex-Marine fighter pilot tore into President Donald Trump's Pentagon during a Wednesday appearance on CNN, taking the agency to task over damning new reports about promotions being blocked for women and minority officers.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had, potentially in defiance of military rules, intervened to block nine officers from being added to a list for promotions, half of whom were either women or people of color. This revelation came amidst a growing trend of Hegseth firing, demoting or otherwise disrespecting military officers who are not white men, or those who had previously participated in pro-diversity activities.
During Wednesday's edition of The Situation Room on CNN, co-host Pamela Brown discussed the reports with Amy McGrath, who previously served as a fighter pilot for the Marine Corps and retired after 20 years of service, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel. She has also become a frequent Democratic candidate for Congress from Kentucky, running unsuccessful bids for the House in 2018 and, most notably, to unseat Mitch McConnell in the Senate in 2020. She also sought the 2026 Democratic nomination for McConnell's seat, but lost in the primary to former state representative Charles Booker.
In the interview, McGrath explained how the candidates put forward for this promotion list are already the "best of the best," having "spent theirentire careers in doing veryhard jobs, very highperformance," and added that they face the "toughest scrutiny of performancerecords of any profession that Iknow" in order to get there.
"Takes months of review,and these boards, they make sureyou've done the tough jobs," McGrath said. "They make sure you've done themvery well. All of these officershave done this, or theywouldn't have gotten to thispoint. And for the names to bepulled by Secretary Hegseth,clearly, because of race andgender, is outrageous, andit's beneath what America stands for. And unfortunately,there's not much that folks inthe military can do about it."
McGrath further touched on the broader campaign by Hegseth to purge the military of what Brown called "so-called wokeness."
"Pete Hegseth and histeam are trolling the militaryrecords and social mediaaccounts of officers, andthey're punishing anyone who hasever served on a diversity taskforce, potentially in the past,or have said anything having to do with championing diversity inthe past," she explained. "They're punishinganyone who was involved in thewithdrawal of Afghanistan."
She continued later: "And this sends justa chilling message to everyonein the Pentagon and everyonewithin DOD. They're walkingaround, people are walkingaround scared right now...trying not to get fired. Andthat's, you know, aproblem. It's ultimately aproblem for our nationalsecurity writ large."
McGrath also called it "absolutely wrong and outrageous" for officers to be punished for things in the past that they had no choice but to do once given orders, likening it to the purge of the Justice Department of any employees who were assigned to the classified documents case involving President Donald Trump and his Mar-a-Lago residence.