“Dead Man Walking”: Officials Say Hegseth Has to Go

In the run-up to the midterm election, seen by many as a referendum on the Iran war, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth unveiled FORTRESS America — a project to allow U.S. military bases to survive a 90-day siege. But following the landslide Democratic victory, it’s Hegseth who finds himself increasingly besieged within his own fortress, the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill where he stands on the brink of bipartisan impeachment.

In the wake of an election rout that handed Democrats firm control of the House and the Senate, Hegseth is in the crosshairs of lawmakers whom he has treated with contempt for two years, as he has withheld basic information from Congress and purged bipartisan-backed senior military leaders. “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who is now in line to be speaker of the House, announced at a campaign rally just before Election Day. Asked about the self-styled War Secretary on Wednesday, Jeffries replied: “Is Pete Hegseth still around?”

As the blue wave crested on Tuesday, storm clouds stacked up on Hegseth’s horizon. “We’re going to go after Hegseth,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in line to return to the helm of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, announced after cruising to victory on Tuesday. “LAWYER UP,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, posted on X. Both will be joined in the House by Democrat Nancy Lacore, a former Navy admiral who was fired by Hegseth, who declared victory in a traditionally red district in South Carolina.

By Wednesday evening, sentiment within the Pentagon suggested that Hegseth’s days are numbered, with names of potential replacements already being bandied about. “Dead man walking,” said one official. A former defense official agreed: “They pinned the failure in Iran on him. Now it’s only a matter of time.” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, with support from Democrats, is slated to take aim at Hegseth as soon as next week with eight articles of impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors.

With Hegseth increasingly under fire within the ranks, at the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill, and with rumors swirling that the White House may cut him loose in the face of the staggering electoral defeat, The Intercept spoke with six current and former defense officials as well as additional sources on Capitol Hill, most on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely. Hegseth has, they said, undermined the rule of law; irreparably harmed the U.S. military through purges of top commanders and those who refuse to pledge fealty; pursued relentless leak investigations; spurred religious extremism; and diminished the department he leads due to an almost endless raft of scandals, culture-war clownishness, and senseless policies.

Hegseth “is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted.”

One of the officials, Wes J. Bryant — until last year a senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon — gave voice to Massie’s more technical articles of impeachment which indict Hegseth for extrajudicial killings and waging unlawful war, among other crimes. “He is conducting state terrorism. He is 100 percent a war criminal. He needs to be prosecuted,” said Bryant, who was pushed out of his Pentagon job for blowing the whistle on Hegseth’s efforts to undermine protections for civilians.

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Hegseth — a former Army National Guard officer turned Fox News host turned secretary of war — came into office amid a firestorm of scandal from his confirmation process, including a swirl of allegations of financial mismanagement at veterans’ nonprofits where he once worked, excessive drinking and public drunkenness, marital infidelity, and sexual assault.

His reign at the Pentagon has been no less tumultuous and marked by a string of appalling episodes of both major importance and more symbolic disgrace, beginning with Signal-gate — the texting of secret war plans that put troops in harm’s way — and follow-on digital security lapses. The Pentagon’s own inspector general concluded last December that “Hegseth violated security protocols and endangered U.S. troops and objectives by using a personal device to share sensitive operational details on the unclassified messaging app Signal.”

Those scandals, however, turned out to be the high point of his tenure. Since then, Hegseth has been under perpetual fire for his purge of top military leaders — many of them women and minorities; an inability to defeat Yemen’s Houthis in 2025 or win the Iran war in 2026; a strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children; his campaign of extrajudicial killings in attacks on so-called drug boats; overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict; openly advocating for offering enemies “no quarter,” a war crime; his installation of a Pentagon makeup studio at taxpayer expense; an unnatural and immature fixation with violence; an obsession with troops’ testosterone levels, a censorship campaign that replaced the Pentagon press corps with cheerleading influencers, among other distractions, dysfunctions, and tantrums.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson and other top spokespersons did not respond to detailed questions and repeated requests for comment.

In April, Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., filed six articles of impeachment against Hegseth, including violations of the law of armed conflict and targeting of civilians, abuse of power, and obstructing congressional oversight. “Impeach Pete Hegseth,” Ansari wrote in a quote tweet of a Hegseth post on X on Wednesday.

In September, Massie was poised to force a vote to impeach Hegseth on eight charges. As the initiative gained bipartisan momentum, House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to punt and dismissed members of the House before the scheduled vote. But Massie, who was defeated in a GOP primary in May — the most expensive House primary in history — remains committed to ousting Hegseth and plans to force a vote on the measure.

“I give it better than a 50 percent chance of passing,” Massie told Roll Call just prior to Election Day, expressing confidence that all Democrats and some Republicans would join his effort. On Wednesday night, Massie took to X to double down on his commitment. “There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment,” he wrote. “Hegseth resigns.”

Massie’s office did not return a request for comment.

In the wake of Tuesday’s stunning electoral landslide, a senior Hill staffer told The Intercept that he believed mounting anger might cause top outgoing Republicans to vote to impeach Hegseth. “There are very angry senior Republicans in the national security space who honestly pin a lot of their election losses on him. They are furious,” he said. “They need some place to put their anger. So they’re asking themselves, ‘What is even the harm in voting to impeach Hegseth?”

“Democratic leadership wants to focus on people’s everyday lives and affordability, not impeaching Hegseth. But here we are. We are going to vote on impeachment because of Tom Massie. It’s happening,” said the senior staffer. “This reckoning is coming whether we want it or not. So why not?”

California Democrat Ro Khanna, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and has repeatedly sparred with Hegseth during hearings, told The Intercept that he supports impeachment and thinks its odds of succeeding are “decent.” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on that committee, vowed on Wednesday to conduct aggressive Pentagon oversight and backed efforts to impeach Hegseth. “Going after the corruption, and going after the lack of transparency,” Smith told the Seattle Times of his plans to hold the department accountable while expressing support for Massie’s impeachment push.

In 250 years, the House has impeached just two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024. In both cases, the Senate did not convict. Should Massie’s impeachment measure succeed in the House, it would likely die in the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., would have no incentive to bring it to a vote, said a congressional staffer for a member on the Armed Services Committee.

But some pundits predict Hegseth may not survive next week, much less the month or the year.

The president “always loves you right up until he throws you under the bus.”

Trump was asked Wednesday afternoon whether he was considering replacing Hegseth, and he told reporters, “No, I think he’s doing a very good job.” One former Pentagon official called such public support from Trump “the kiss of death.” Another current defense official agreed. “He may lose his top cover,” said that official, using military slang for protection from above. The president, the official said, “always loves you right up until he throws you under the bus.”

As Republicans make sense of their loss, many are pointing to the Iran war, including Vice President JD Vance. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote on X. A Republican staffer on Capitol Hill said Hegseth “could easily become the president’s fall guy.” The senior staffer agreed, saying Hegseth “might be purged, himself, to avoid additional embarrassment.”

“If Hegseth does stay and he survives this moment, Oversight is going to come crashing down on his head,” said the senior staffer on Wednesday. “Will Hegseth continue to obstruct? Yes. But wait until the subpoenas start.”

Congressional committees have broad investigative powers, including the authority to subpoena administration officials to testify under oath and compel them to turn over documents. Smith said Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg would be first on the list to testify. “We haven’t gotten a report back from the Minab girls’ school strike. How come we haven’t gotten clarity on the strike in Kuwait that killed six service members? How come they haven’t told us what the true cost is that’s been absorbed by all of our bases that have been destroyed in the Middle East?” Smith said to the Seattle Times. “There’s a host of issues we could dive into.”

Another staffer said renewed scrutiny of abuses of war powers like the boat strikes, especially the initial double-tap attack first disclosed by The Intercept; the secret memorandum by the Office of Legal Counsel laying out the legal rationale for the strikes; and the hidden costs, U.S. casualties, civilian casualties, and destruction of U.S. bases during the Iran war, would open a Pandora’s box for Hegseth.

In the Senate, Democrats have floated Hegseth’s removal as the price for cooperation on key legislation in the lame-duck session. Their Republican colleagues have also increasingly soured on Hegseth as he has purged top military commanders with whom they have strong ties. “They see Hegseth as the next Kristi Noem,” said one Capitol Hill source, referencing the former secretary of homeland security who was demoted this year to special envoy for the newly founded Shield of the Americas coalition after influential Republican senators turned against her.

On Tuesday, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican who is retiring, warned Hegseth of a coming “reckoning” in the lame-duck session. “He is one of the reasons why we don’t have the funding or guarantee for defense that we need,” he said. “I think after the election, we need to determine whether or not he’s the best person to bring those needs to Congress.”

Antipathy to Hegseth also extends far beyond the Beltway. Just 32 percent of voters approve of the way he is handling his job, while 57 percent disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University poll in September. It was his lowest approval ever and historically dismal. (Fifty percent approved and only 13 percent disapproved of Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, late in his tenure in 2018.) Hegseth is even less popular in military circles. Sixty-four percent of active-duty service members, veterans, and military families disapprove of Hegseth, according to a recent poll conducted by Common Defense, a grassroots veterans organization. Last month, a Politico poll found that 63 percent of Democratic midterm voters would support impeaching the Pentagon chief.

The war secretary is also under withering fire within the Pentagon, according to the current and former officials. They say Hegseth is reviled across the building by officers biding their time, waiting for him to flame out or be pushed out.

Derided in the Pentagon and the ranks by a variety of monikers such as “No Tab Pete,” a reference to his lack of prestigious military qualification patches such as the Ranger tab; “Whiskey Pete”; and “Dumb McNamara,” a reference to the Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, responsible for unfathomable death and suffering; Hegseth has been excoriated within his department for unhinged behavior — especially his relentless purge of top brass and high-ranking officials, which insiders see as an attempt to root out dissenting viewpoints, racial minorities, and women.

To enforce strict discipline, tamp down scandals, keep basic information from the American people and cow dissent, Hegseth has unleashed unrelenting polygraph tests of officials, even senior leaders. Several officials would not respond to questions citing this reason. One likened their situation to life under a totalitarian regime. Hegseth’s minions have also engaged in browbeating “leaky” offices. These efforts have generated further ill will throughout the Pentagon and the wider defense establishment. “The more good people he forces out of the military, the more the resentment grows,” said a current official.

Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia — who served as director for strategy, plans and policy on the Joint Staff assisting Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Dan Caine — was recently ousted. “She’s gonna have big problems, said Trump, who apparently thought the male general was a woman. “We’re very much looking for leakers.” Sylvia replaced Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee, whom Hegseth forced out last year. While not naming Sylvia, Pentagon mouthpiece Sean Parnell issued a social media broadside. “Following an extensive Air Force OSI investigation, the Department took necessary personnel action to protect sensitive information,” he crowed on X. “We vowed to find you, and we meant it.”

Other casualties of Hegseth’s campaign include Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr. (chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Adm. Lisa Franchetti (chief of Naval Operations), Gen. David Allvin (Air Force chief of staff), Adm. Linda Fagan (commandant of the Coast Guard), Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short (senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense), Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield (U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee), and Lacore, the former vice admiral and Navy Reserve chief, now likely representative-elect, among others.

The officials said that Hegseth’s efforts to remake the military have done grave damage to the armed forces. “When you put people on polygraphs and fire a bunch of people who question the status quo and consistently shut down the conversation, then you absolutely lose the best leaders,” said a former field grade officer who served in Hegseth’s Pentagon. “You’re strangling initiative and creating a culture of yes men and yes women.”

Officials repeatedly lamented long-term harm to the Pentagon, whenever Hegseth leaves the helm. “He’s purging a generation of great leaders of the military, and it’s going to take a generation to recover from it,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a former Navy combat pilot who has been targeted by Hegseth. The former field grade officer echoed this. “If you’re doing it right, the talent selection is being done ten years out,” the source said, noting that promotions are a long-term process. “It’s about years down the road. And these people are being fired and forced out. We’re losing them. That’s generational impact that’s harming the force.”

In his September “state of the force” address to more than 500 junior officers and enlisted troops, Hegseth announced, “We are no longer the Woke Department or the Weak Department. Simple translation of that: No fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals.” He added, “The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in — with testosterone testing on top.”

Several officials drew connections between Hegseth’s fixation on manliness and testosterone with his childish fixation on “lethality,” his glorification of violence, and bloodlust. “‘Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,’” said one official quoting a Hegseth line. “That kind of language and the very, very real killing of civilians — and the posting online of what are outright snuff films, the narco-boat strikes, is evidence of a sickness of his mind.”

The real-world effects of Hegseth’s lethality obsession have been devastating. His Pentagon has gutted its premier center devoted to preventing civilian casualties in war zones. He also removed constraints on military commanders, “letting his preferred generals do anything they want,” said one of the former defense officials. This resulted, for example, in significantly more civilian casualties during attacks on Yemen’s Houthi government in 2025, while failing to achieve military objectives. The Pentagon’s own accounting of civilian casualties found that U.S. attacks killed 153 civilians and wounded almost 250 during the campaign of air and naval strikes, code-named Operation Rough Rider. A current official told The Intercept these were “lowball numbers.” At least 238 civilians were killed and 467 injured, according to the Yemen Data Project.

“This obsession with performative violence is a hallmark of fascist dictatorships.”

Several sources drew special attention to Hegseth’s effort — ultimately blocked by Trump — to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people when he opened fire at Fort Hood in 2009. “This obsession with performative violence is a hallmark of fascist dictatorships,” said Bryant. Hegseth’s lethality doctrine, he continued, “is not only in line with the glorification of and reveling in violence and killing that defines him but is juvenile and ignorant from an operational and policy standpoint, as killing and lethality is only one relatively small aspect of what the military does.”

Officials also keyed in on Hegseth’s stilted version of violent Christianity. One former official pointed to Hegseth’s monthly Pentagon prayer services as sowing dissent within the building. “I would never go to that shit,” said a current official, drawing specific attention to a March service in which Hegseth quoted Psalm 3, praying for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly,” and asking God to back troops’ “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” That official said Hegseth’s Christianity was an “abomination” and “an affront to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

Bryant, a retired Air Force Special Operations targeting specialist and co-author of “Hunting the Caliphate: America’s War on ISIS and the Dawn of the Strike Cell,” likened Hegseth’s interpretation of Christianity to the puritanical brand of religion practiced by America’s enemies during the war on terror. “His so-called war on woke is actually a far-right Christian nationalist crusade. His skewed version of Christianity is as extreme as the sharia of ISIS and the Taliban are to Islam. And that’s what he is infusing into, and proliferating across, the force.”

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Hegseth has been quick to smear everyone from veterans serving in Congress to members of the press as treasonous, calling rigorous reporting on the military “fundamentally anti-American.” He added: “It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.” Hegseth frequently tries to paint criticism of his department as smearing troops to foster an us-them divide between the military and the American people they serve.

During his September state of the force address, Hegseth cast troops as superior to those in the civilian world. “See, the Ivy League faculty lounges, they’ll never understand you, and that’s OK, because they could never, ever do what you do. The media will mischaracterize you, and that’s OK. Because deep down they know you’re the real reason they live free. They envy you because you do real things every single day,” said Hegseth, an Ivy League-educated millionaire who used to work for Fox News. “Lethality is your calling card. … The outside world can’t understand this, so stay true to this department. You don’t want to look like civilians, because you are different, you are set apart. You are warriors.” He added, “You are the real 1 percent.”

Several officials said Hegseth’s effort to cast the armed forces as superior to the rest of the American people was antithetical to military values and especially alarming under an administration that has dispatched troops to American cities and threatens to do so, again. “The worst thing would be if we deploy the military in the streets of cities like they did last year in California. I’m talking about where the military is violently interacting with our citizenry,” said the former field grade officer. “You’ve paved the way for a more obedient military and then you have guys and gals with the guns having to decide whether orders — from the president that we elected and the secretary of defense that he’s appointed — are lawful. It’s dangerous.”

Bryant, who served as branch chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, pointed out that Hegseth’s dichotomy embraces the elitism that he claims to despise. “Our military, just as our government, is meant to be not only for the people but of the people,” he told The Intercept. “When we look at fascist military regimes, now and in history, another hallmark is this strict separation of soldier or warrior class from the civilian population. It is fundamentally anti-American and it is dangerous.”

All six officials, in one way or another, assailed Hegseth as juvenile, embarrassing, and unserious. “Imagine any other SecDef talking about packing the Pentagon with ‘patriotic cowboys,’” said one of the former officials. “Any one of them would have been run out of town.” A current official said Hegseth was unequivocally the “worst SecDef in memory” and that Massie’s impeachment vote couldn’t come soon enough. That official said it would take years to undo the harm Hegseth has done to the military but whether he was removed by impeachment, was fired by Trump, or quit under duress, the first step was ridding the Pentagon of his presence. “Hegseth,” he said “has got to go.”

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