Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) on Sunday pushed back on the idea that Pete Hegseth, President-elect Trump's choice for Defense secretary in his upcoming administration, has an issue with drinking.
“Now, if he did have a drinking problem, that would be obvious, but to make something out of it that isn't there just because he's going through secretary of Defense, the media should be ashamed of themselves,” Mullin told anchor Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As Hegseth has attempted to secure the role of head of the Pentagon, there have been recent reports coming out about him drinking in excess. In the last week, The New Yorker reported that two nonprofit groups that Hegseth ran pushed him to step away because of mismanagement of funds, sexual impropriety and excessive drinking, and NBC reported that his drinking caused concern among his former Fox News colleagues.
Republican senators’ scrutiny of Hegseth has grown in the wake of recent revelations of alleged alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct in his past.
Despite the controversy, Hegseth said Wednesday that he won't back down, and in a post on the social platform X, he suggested that he is the target of a smear campaign by Democrats.
“I’m doing this for the warfighters, not the warmongers. The Left is afraid of disrupters and change agents. They are afraid of @realDonaldTrump—and me,” he wrote.
In his appearance on "State of the Union" on Sunday, Mullin said, "There's a lot of alcohol that flows through Washington, D.C., on a regular basis, and I wouldn't say that people are alcoholics or they have a drinking problem because of that."
“I don’t — I don’t see it at all,” he added. “I don’t see that being a problem, and I really wish that the media would move on and start … focusing on what he can bring … as secretary of Defense, because he has a lot of good attributes, too.”
