Is Pete Hegseth’s Strike Scandal an Impeachable Offense?

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Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlove.
It's Friday, so Aaron Parness is here with me and

for sure, but double woo, woo, woo. Forbes 30 under 30.
Aaron Parnas, congratulations. Thank you.
Thank you. It's been a fun week.
Yeah. Like, actually? Yeah.
People see it, right? Well, yeah.

I mean, that was fun, but it's also December. And I tell everyone if I ever ran for office, my first bill would be to give December off to everyone.
Kidding, not kidding. So I

kind of live in them, embody that and relax in December. Okay.
I like it. You know, Scott does Scott-free August.
Yeah.

So you're working up to it. Yeah, essentially.
Okay. I mean, we all are.
We're not at Scott level. Well, congratulations.
It was very cool. I was psyched when I saw that you got in.

And Ed Elson, Prof Dew Markets host, also got in all the babies. Oh, that's exciting.
Yeah, really exciting. Pleased to know all you young superstars.

I want to talk about politics, though. Obviously, really, really bad week for Pete Hegstas.
I might be even like underestimating how terrible it is.

We now have confirmation from the Pentagon's IG report that the defense secretary was basically live blogging a military strike in a signal group chat.

Can you talk us through what was in the IG report, the responses we've heard so far? And it seems like there were literal timestamps of when the bombs were going to be dropped.

Does that level of specificity mean

anything is going to come from it? Or is this just going to kind of washed into the general deluge? Yeah, so I'm a nerd and I actually read all

because you're a Forbes 30 under 30 nerd no i mean yeah i'm a nerd um but i read all 84 pages the top lines the biggest takeaways for me are a few things the first is that pete hegseth uh actively put american troops in danger that's what the ig found by essentially revealing classified information on this unsecured network which is signal the second top line is that he didn't properly declassify the information as he was sending it.

So the IG finds that being that he's a secretary of defense, he has the power to declassify information kind of in real time, just like the president does.

If they want to declassify something, they can, just given their position. But Pete Hegseth didn't do that in a proper way.
And in fact, he sent this on his like personal phone on a personal network.

It wasn't, it wasn't secure at all. It wasn't properly declassified.
So that's the second thing. The third thing is Pete Hegseth didn't really cooperate with the investigation.

Yes, he sent over the Pentagon sent over copies of his phone in terms of the screenshots of the messages and things like that, but he didn't actually refuse to sit down for an interview with the IEG.

But with all that being said, what kind of frustrated me at the end of this was that the IEG's conclusion was just like senior Pentagon leaders need more technical training. Like, okay, I got it.

They're old. They need to learn more.
But this isn't about like technical training. It's like military 101.
Don't share classified information on unsecured networks.

I spoke to Congressman Pat Ryan literally right before we got on this call. And he told me, he was like, well, I was served in the army as an intelligence officer.

If I did what Hexeth did, I'd be serving time behind bars right now. And like this double, triple, quadruple standard that we're seeing is just, it's, it's wrong.
Yeah.

I mean, on top of it, and the signal chat scandal seems so long ago considering what we've gone through since then.

I mean, part of the problem as well is how many people were on this chat, like over 20 people, including obviously Jeffrey Coleberg, the editor of The Atlantic, who was invited into it by mistake by Mike Waltz, who also served and should have known better.

I mean, Mike is now the ambassador to the UN instead of being the national security advisor.

So they're, I guess, you know, ahead to proverbially roll, but he still has a great job and no one is serving time for any of this.

So I guess your expectation is that it'll turn into a nothing burger for President Trump?

I mean, I listen, I think it's a, by definition, a high crime and a misdemeanor, right? It is.

Sharing classified information on an unclassified server is an illegal act. And Pat Ryan kind of admitted to that when I was talking to him.
It is a high crime and misdemeanor.

It is an impeachable offense by definition.

And so I think that if and when Democrats take the House in next year, one of their first responsibilities, assuming Hexeth is still in office, which I don't know if he will be, I actually don't think he will be, would be to, in my opinion, conduct a full-throated investigation and potentially impeach Hexeth.

I mean, that has to be done at this point,

purely on SignalGate. And I'm not even talking about the boat strikes because that's a whole nother situation.

But based on SignalGate, the definition of a a high crime and misdemeanor, in a lot of ways based on legal analysis and past impeachments, is a crime.

And Hegseth committed a crime based on what the IEG found. So it's kind of black and white to me.
Okay. And you already teased the next topic, which is the Caribbean boat strikes.

Admiral Bradley, widely respected by those on the right and on the left,

appears to be a bit of the fall guy for what happened.

He was briefing both the House and the Senate.

Little Little plug, check out my conversation with the top Democrat on the Intel Committee, Jim Himes, on our YouTube channel, whose takeaway was that it was one of the more disturbing things that he's heard and seen.

There's only video footage of the first strike, not the second, that took out the two survivors from the first round.

Can you give me your top line thoughts on what we know, I guess, from Bradley's testimony and where you think it goes from here?

So we don't know much still, but what we do know, Him said it, like you said, it's one of the most disturbing things he's seen in public service i think truth be told the white house and hexeth made a major mistake by kind of throwing bradley under the bus here you think because i think bradley if anyone knows this person he

has served the united states military with distinction served for a long time has a lot of fans in the military, right? This is not like some disgruntled officer.

This is someone who's been there for a long time and has a lot of honor and respect.

And by throwing him under the bus, they made it all the more likely, in my opinion, that someone in the military is going to, A, leak the video of the boat strikes, B,

if and when there is an impeachment inquiry into someone or some type of congressional inquiry, you're going to have people willing to testify against the White House and against Hexeth.

Remember, these military service officers, they have loyalty to the Constitution. They don't have loyalty to Pete Hexeth or Donald Trump.

They have loyalty to the Constitution and the oath that they swear to.

So I think by throwing one of their kind of career military service members under the bus like this, it's going to make it all much worse for Hegseth, all much worse for Trump.

And ultimately, I mean, I don't, I think heads have to roll. I don't know whose, right? I still don't know whether Hegseth gave the order or not.
But to me, I don't know what's worse.

Hexeth giving the order to kill everyone or to conduct the second strike, or Hexeth not knowing that right under him

on the first day of these strikes, this happened. Like, what's worth? You have an absent Secretary of Defense or an intentional, I guess, murder? I don't know.
Yeah, I mean,

it's been overwhelming. And it feels like there hasn't been a story in a bit where there's so much incoming and there's so many people making comments about it.

And I don't mean just like talking heads. I'm talking about sitting members of Congress and the Senate, like Rand Paul, GOP Congressman Mike Turner, was on Morning Joe talking about this.

And he said, no matter what it was, like, we don't have capital punishment for what these guys are accused of doing anyway. So it does get into the category of murder.
Like, we could just stop there.

You don't even have to be talking about whether you thought that they were contacting other members of the cartel because that's the news story.

And NBC was running with it and ABC.

And I saw a lot of people on the right, I think maybe even including members of the administration, using Martha Raditz's report to say that they were exonerated by it because the idea was that these two guys who survived the first strike were on the boat and contacting somebody to help them.

And so they were saying, oh, here, you know, they were still engaged in the illegal activity. And then Mike Turner just, you know, said,

absolutely not. You don't murder people anyway for trafficking cocaine.
You put them in prison. Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I, so I studied international law.

I took multiple classes on the international law of armed conflict.

We had situations like this, obviously not exact, but you look through history and there have been similar situations in armed conflict when countries, militaries kill individuals who pose no threat to that country, to that military.

And to me, this is a clear-cut example of a situation where you have a shipwrecked boat in the middle of the high seas. I mean, this is not like on the beach, right?

This is the middle of the Caribbean, hundreds of thousands of feet of water. Their boat is literally on fire.
Who cares if they can get up and call someone?

That's not, I mean, that's not the standard.

Whether or not they can, even if they can get up on that boat and call for more cartel members to come and rescue the drugs and rescue them and continue on, that even if that were true, which we don't know is true or not, even if that were true, that would still not be enough to

justify a second strike. Why? Because in that moment, they did not pose a threat to the United States of America.
They were on a shipwrecked boat. And a shipwrecked boat.

by definition under international law cannot be targeted. And that is exactly what happened here.

It doesn't make sense. Like, who cares if they can can call for help? Like, with what phone? Honestly, like, this boat's on fire.
Like,

it's literally like on fire in the middle of the ocean. And you want them to get up on some smoldering wood because these are like little dinghies and call with what service.

I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. No.
Um, well, we'll be watching that one closely. We're going to take a quick break.
Stay with us.

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Welcome back. I want to make sure that we get to some more of the big news from this week.
We had a special election on Tuesday that was very closely watched. Tennessee's 7th district.

it became a national election, which I think hurt the Democrats a lot there, but it was still a big overperformance, 12, 13 points.

Matt Van Epps, who is the new Republican congressman for the district, won a seat that was Trump plus 22 in just 2024.

So Democrats are running around touting this as, you know, a harbinger of good things to come and a big win.

I was really focused on the primary, the Democratic primary that took place because there were three moderate candidates candidates in that primary. And so they kind of all split the vote.

And Afton Bate, who was the candidate super far-left Democrat socialist

DSA member, I should say,

you know, had bad previous tweets saying like the fund the police, et cetera, never apologized for them, ended up winning because the moderates all split each other. And so she ran away with it.

I think we probably could have done even better with one of the more centrist candidates, considering how conservative Tennessee is.

But what's your read on the special election and what it means for the midterms and beyond? I mean, I think it's a, it spells trouble, obviously.

And I mean, I can give you the generic, like, yes, this is spells trouble. Well, don't.
I didn't invite you here for generic. Yeah, I mean, obviously.
30 under 30, Aaron Parnas. It shifts to the left.

The district shift to 10 points, blah, blah, blah. Heard it all.
Right. My question, and I want to ask you, and I want to put you on the spot a little bit here, because this is raging moderates.

Do you think a moderate would have done better?

I mean, like, do you think i do think that yeah yeah right like yeah i i do i mean i think that listen afton bay and i interviewed her i thought she was um a great person i don't know that she was the best candidate in the race for the district right like she got attacked for hating country music for attacking nashville and then the whole bachelorettes the bachelorettes but also like the defund the police issue i mean

you can when you say something that you may not fully believe anymore or say something that's not fully politically advantageous, you could say like, hey, I don't believe that fully anymore.

Like we're going to walk that back. To win in a district like this, I don't know.

I think it also is a major sign for the midterms that you got to run good candidates everywhere. You can't just run a candidate and expect to win.

And I think that when you're looking at like races, like for example, Wisconsin's third, which I talk about all the time, Afton Bain running in Wisconsin's third against Derek Van Orton would lose by 20 points.

But you have a great candidate actually right now for Democrats and Rebecca Cook, who's lived there, who's dairy, like worked on a farm, like family farm, all that, and like has the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and like Ezra Klein, like the center and the left.

That's who you need running nationwide, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree with you.
I mean, the candidate equality is going to be the name of the game. And it has been always consistently.

I like that the Democrats are trying to kind of rehash the 2018 camo wave, a lot of military recruits, which I think is a very good look for my party. But I totally agree with you.

I think also the nationalization of the race really hurt her. And I don't want to be in a position where high turnout means Democrats do worse because that's what happened in 2024, right?

Like if less people had voted, Democrats would have done better, which is a bummer because you want the most people possible to exercise their constitutional rights.

And you also want to be the party that the majority of people want to support.

So in agreement there, when she said on election night, she was on CNN, Afton Bain, and said, yeah, no, I'm definitely thinking about running again. i was like

maybe not in this particular district but there are going to be dsa members that are running in primaries all over the country one just announced for the dc mayor since muriel bowser isn't going to run again and you know people have to win primaries but also have to be strategic and smart about it like if there are three people who basically have the same platform in the race somebody has to go and consolidate yeah i agree i mean i will also say like if afton runs again in this district okay that's fine like she could run this is not a district that Democrats will win in 2026.

Even if she won last night or two nights ago, we wouldn't have won it in 2026. It just, it's not a district that in a regular election cycle would go blue.

And there's, there shouldn't be any hope that it would. The only opportunity that Democrats had to flip this was because it was a special election in a anti-Trump kind of environment.

Heading into 2026, it's not going to be a special election. It's going to be a general midterm.
Very anti-Trump, sure, but it's not going to be the same kind of headwinds that we saw.

One One of the major headwinds that's been working against the Republican Party is obviously this dismissal of the quote-unquote affordability issue.

I don't know why Donald Trump keeps running into this wall saying that affordability isn't real, but a big part of that is obviously health care. We'll see what happens with the ACA subsidies vote.

But I saw that just this morning, Mike Johnson has said that the Republicans are going to put up their own health care bill and get a vote on it by the end of the year.

A, do you believe him? And B, what do you think a Republican health care bill that could actually get support looks like?

I don't know because I don't think he even knows. Like, I think if you asked him today, give me an example of like some part of this bill, he won't give you an answer because he doesn't even know.

I don't think, I mean, do I believe him that there could be a text of a bill ready for a vote next week? Sure. There could be a text that ChatGPT can write it today.

plug it in, say, Republican health care bill and pump something out. But the party doesn't know where, where it's at in terms of healthcare.

Trump wants Obamacare light, as some in the Republican caucus have called it. So, like, I don't know.

I think ultimately, what the only way healthcare is saved, in my opinion, is if Trump wakes up one day and is like, you know what?

I need the House in 2026. Healthcare is going to be on the ballot.
Let me just put pressure on Republicans and say, you know what, screw it. Like, you have to do this.

And if you don't do it, I'm going to go to the Democrats and get it done with them. But I don't see that happening either.
So. Okay.
So nothing.

I harp on this perhaps too much, but it is a frustration of mine that it feels like on healthcare that Democrats tend to defend the status quo, which is still better than what Republicans would offer, but still not good enough.

And I'm curious if A, you agree with me on that.

And B, if you think that this new, you've heard this, I'm sure, like strong floor, no ceiling that Hakeem Jeffrey is using and Dems are talking about, which I think makes sense.

Like we need a social safety net, but also we want to make sure that you can have the best possible life. And if you want to earn a lot of money, that's your prerogative.

And we're going to be supportive.

If you think that that's going to work for us, I guess going forward into the midterms. Could.

I don't know. I mean,

it could.

I'm not like, I don't know.

How do you think the midterms are going to go? Because you do not seem that positive right now. So if I think if the midterms were held today, Democrats would win 250, 260 seats in the House.

Like it would be a monstrous win for Democrats.

But we have 11 months to go. And ultimately, the way I believe elections go is the way the economy goes.

And if prices somehow start falling and if the Supreme Court says, you know what, screw you, Trump, you can't do these tariffs. And he has to roll back the tariffs.

And now he says, well, look, prices are down again. And the market's good.
And people are, and the job market somehow recovers. I don't know where we're going to be in 11 months.

And I don't know what the midterms will look like then. So I think it's, it's definitely not in the bag for Democrats.
Do I think the Democrats will win the House? Yes. The question is by how much?

That's kind of where I'm at. Okay.
That seems reasonable. I felt for a couple of days like Democrats could win the Senate too, actually, but I'm back on that right now.
People keep telling me that.

And like, they get mad at me when I say, I don't think they're going to win the Senate. And I'm like, but look at the map.

Like we know the map's really hard, but I do think to your point about candidate quality, and obviously there are a few primaries that we don't know how that's going to shake out, but I feel good about the quality of candidates that are in the tough races.

I mean, it's about, let's see who comes out of these primaries and go from there. Fair.
All right. Well, we have many Fridays to go before that.

I want to ask you about all the pardons. Trump has been on a spree of pardons and commutations.

Some of them just seem like normal cronyism or whatever, like the private equity guy who defrauded $1.6 billion from like farmers and veterans and teachers and things like that.

You have the former Honduran president who trafficked enough cocaine into the United States to kill millions of people, which I guess Trump doesn't care about when someone Roger Stone likes does it.

Henry Quear stuck out to me, the Democratic congressman.

What did you think about that? Did it surprise you? And why do you think all of this is happening right now? It's surprising because I didn't think he had to do it.

I mean, if anyone knew the facts of Henry Queyar's case, I actually, based on what I read and what a lot of legal experts have been saying, I think the judge was going to throw out the charges in April when the motion dismissed hearing.

Like, I thought that the case was a little shaky on legal grounds. Hakeem Jeffries said that too.
He said that he thought that it was thin. Yeah.
And most legal experts thought it was thin.

And I thought, like, I didn't think Trump had to do this, but part of me was like, is this Trump's like way of saying, well, I pardon Democrats and Republicans. Is Bob Menendez next, maybe? Who knows?

He could be next. But I think the one that really shocked me out of all of the pardons was, I forget, it was like some kind of live entertainment dude.

The guy who they prosecuted Justin in July. Yeah.
Correct. That one.
They indicted him in July and now they pardon him in December. That makes no sense to me.
Like, this is your own DOJ.

Why indict him if you're going to go ahead and pardon him? I mean, Emil Bove was the one who started the prosecution of the former president of Honduras. There you go.

You're probably not going to be interested in this, but are you following the Olivia, Nuzzi, Ryan Les's stuff?

I watched the Bulwark interview. Me too.
I think him handled the crying super well.

Like, I almost want to show it to my husband to be like, this is what you should, how you should behave when I'm crying.

Maybe I'll show it to my wife and be like, this is how I will behave. Yeah, you should do that.
It's such an odd story.

Well, it's an odd story, but I appreciate that everyone is focusing on what I think is the most important part of it, which is the issue of journalistic ethics, which we've all been bemoaning that nobody cares anymore.

And obviously, she went beyond the normal pale, right? Like having affairs with people that you're covering.

I mean, reading the strategy memo that she created for RFK Jr., where she was advising him on how to win an election while writing, I would say, the definitive article about Joe Biden that ended up sinking his campaign in the pre-debate world or post-debate world, I should say.

Do you think that this will matter in any way? Or is it just something we're paying attention to for 20 minutes? It's the most DC insider thing that I've seen in a long time.

This is not going to matter to anyone. I mean, you ask, I think you ask 100 Americans who Olivia Nuzzy is.
Maybe one will say they know her.

I mean, like, this is not, that's why I was even surprised Tim interviewed her. I didn't think that like it was even worth platforming her in any respect.

But alas. Okay.

Well, I hope that it does make people think about the way that our media works at this particular moment and how everything is driven by clickbait.

And we saw rage bait, obviously, is the word of the year from the Oxford Dictionary. And I feel like this is like a really endemic problem that something like this could happen.

And then also that you still get a Simon and Schuyler deal, though it seems like the book isn't selling particularly well. Yeah.
But who knows? I was in JFK.

It was number nine, allegedly, on the bestseller list, but then I read. I think it was just on the wrong shelf.
But either way.

And I don't want to give bad juju because I have a book coming out next year and I'm really nervous about it. So I don't want want to talk badly about anyone.
It's going to do great.

It's going to be amazing. All right.

What's one thing that makes you rage? One thing we should all calm down about. One thing that makes me raged, AI.

AI is making me rage lately because I was scrolling on TikTok the other day and I saw a video that looked like Anderson Cooper talking, but it was actually my voice and my

like video just with Anderson Cooper's face on it. And it was like AI generated.

And that makes me rage. And then also at the same time, like I saw another video of of me speaking French fluently and I was like, huh, I don't know.
Well, was that exciting though?

Do you speak French? No, I don't speak French at all. It was interesting, but it makes me rage because people don't really realize that they're getting so much misinformation out there.

And then one thing that everyone should calm down about is

that's a good question, actually.

You knew it was coming because I ask you every Friday. I do.

And then every time I'm like put on the spot and I don't even know what I, I don't remember what I said last week, but I've been saying a lot that like people should calm down about the fact that we're never going to get the Epstein files.

We will, I think I said that last week. We're getting more Epstein files, but I think something else that people should calm down about is working during the holidays.
Oh, like it's not that bad.

Or people should just get the time off. Get the time off.
Right. Well, December is Aaron Parness's month off.
Correct. Exactly.

Well, I'm thrilled that you still spent a few minutes with me during your time off. Of course.
It was great to see you. And likewise.
I'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week.

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