Ex-marine fighter pilot tears apart Trump Pentagon chief for flouting military rules

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 their entire careers in doing very hard jobs, very high performance," and added that they face the "toughest scrutiny of performance records of any profession that I know" in order to get there.

"Takes months of review, and these boards, they make sure you've done the tough jobs," McGrath said. "They make sure you've done them very well. All of these officers have done this, or they wouldn't have gotten to this point. And for the names to be pulled by Secretary Hegseth, clearly, because of race and gender, is outrageous, and it's beneath what America stands for. And unfortunately, there's not much that folks in the 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 his team are trolling the military records and social media accounts of officers, and they're punishing anyone who has ever served on a diversity task force, potentially in the past, or have said anything having to do with championing diversity in the past," she explained. "They're punishing anyone who was involved in the withdrawal of Afghanistan."

She continued later: "And this sends just a chilling message to everyone in the Pentagon and everyone within DOD. They're walking around, people are walking around scared right now... trying not to get fired. And that's, you know, a problem. It's ultimately a problem for our national security 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.