Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, has distinguished himself as one of the most cartoonishly offensive members of Donald Trump’s cabinet of grotesques. His penchant for bravado and open bloodlust (it was his idea to execute a guy in a wheelchair on live TV) is what inspires Donald Trump to defend his record, the president insisting he won a war with Venezuela and “is winning” the one against Iran.
With the midterm carnage and Democrat control of both houses of Congress, those same qualities now have Hegseth in the sights for a reckoning. “A hard yes” is what incoming Democratic speaker of the house Hakeem Jeffries said about the prospect of Hegseth’s impeachment.
The biggest criminal in the Trump administration remains the president himself, but the Democrats are unlikely to pursue his impeachment again — he’s politically more useful to them as a lame duck whom they can blame for the inevitable legislative logjam the next two years will deliver. Instead, their tactical choice may be to go for some lower-hanging fruit, and Hegseth is overripe.
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1272159
Impeachment, which sits outside the courts, is a constitutional process designed by the Founding Fathers to give the legislative branch of government (Congress) some teeth in its oversight of the executive branch. An analogy in Australia’s democracy is parliament’s exclusive power to remove judges and some public servants, such as the director of public prosecutions, from office.
In the US, it’s a two-step process. First, the House of Representatives considers “articles of impeachment” against the selected public officeholder, identifying how they’re accused of committing “treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanours” as the constitutional language specifies.
If the House impeaches (by bare majority), the case goes up to the Senate, which convenes a trial. It can convict and remove the accused from office, but only by two-thirds majority. The Democrats are still well short of that, so some Republican senators would have to join the hanging party (and this is partly why Trump will be left alone).
Critically, these processes sound like legal ones, but they’re political, not judicial. Congress decides for itself what is or isn’t a high crime or misdemeanour and whether the defendant is guilty. These decisions cannot be appealed to a court.
What are Hegseth’s high crimes? Congressman Thomas Massie, who is a Republican and on his way out (he lost his primary), has re-presented eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth, while Democrats have previously lodged resolutions with similar impeachment claims.
It seems the most obvious charge against Hegseth is the list of war crimes involved in his campaign in the Caribbean. Starting in September last year, the US military began blowing up small boats off the coast of South America, killing all their occupants. In many cases, this has included “double-tap” strikes, where survivors of the first blast have been finished off with a second.
There have reportedly been some 80 strikes to date, with 243 fatalities. The claim is that they were drug smugglers. Some no doubt were, others just fishermen or who knows what, which is beside the point because extrajudicial assassination is a crime regardless of context.
Hegseth is also charged with engineering unauthorised military hostilities in Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, all being attacks on other sovereign nations that Congress never approved. This is true, but it’d be hard to identify an American administration that hasn’t illegally invaded or bombed another country at some point. Hegseth might argue, with some force, that he was just engaging in conventional US gunboat diplomacy, albeit without the diplomacy bit.
Then there is a long list of depredations on the integrity and soul of the US military, from Hegseth’s purging of every black or female senior officer he’s come across, mishandling classified information (adding a journalist to a classified Signal chat) and dismantling oversight structures, to his very off-putting fixation on testosterone (“no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos!”)
Related Article Block Placeholder
Article ID: 1271639
From a legal perspective, it’s the murder of civilians that really stands out. The US has a long tradition of extrajudicial killing — don’t forget, Barack Obama, when president, held the record for targeted drone strikes in foreign places before Trump overtook him. But the arbitrary blowing up of boats without even a pretence of evidence is morally no different to the My-Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.
Everything else Hegseth has done is broadly reflective of his confected persona as a cross between Rambo and Don Draper, a swaggering pastiche of faux machismo and Call of Duty taglines. Most of his acts are criminal in the same way Trump’s golden desecration of the Oval Office is: the crime of making America’s exceptionalist crassness rather too obvious.
Still, as I said, it’s a political process, not a legal one, so if Hegseth is convicted and defenestrated it will be because the politicians (including the 11 or 12 Republican senators who’ll have to cross the floor) have decided that he was ripe for the plucking.
I hope he does go down. The coming impeachment circus is unlikely to deliver justice, but some just deserts would do.
