One of Donald Trump's nominees was escorted on Capitol Hill by a former soldier who left the military after he was accused of brutally beating a civilian role player during a training exercise.
Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth has been accompanied this month by former Army Special Forces Master Sergeant John Jacob Hasenbein, who left the service after witnesses said he kicked, punched and hogtied a former Iraqi soldier during a 2019 training exercise, reported the New York Times.
“This guy has real anger issues,” said Ahmed Altameemi, the former member of the Iraqi Army’s elite counterterrorism service who Hasenbein was charged with assaulting. "He is not a safe man. I don’t know why they gave him this position. Don’t they do any background checks?”
The Army charged Hasenbein, who had deployed to Iraq eight times, with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, and a military jury found him guilty in a court martial in 2020. But the judge overseeing the case declared a mistrial after learning that a friend of Hasebein had been talking to a juror.
A supervisor alleged that Hasenbein, now 45, rubbed Altameemi’s face into a concrete pillar, kicked him and repeatedly struck him with “hammer-fist” blows to his ribs and “knee strikes” to his face.
“The other guys realized things were wrong and started to calm down,” said another company employee involved in the exercise. "[Hasenbein] didn’t calm down — he never calmed down."
A third witness said he found Altameemi, now 38 and an American citizen living in Texas, lying face down and hogtied, moaning in pain, and had a pool of blood around his head.
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Altameemi suffered a broken nose, a broken tooth, a sprained shoulder, a scalp hematoma and blunt facial trauma, according to memos and witness statements, and he said that Hasenbein understood that a training exercise should not end like that.
“He is a man with experience, a master sergeant — he knows this is training on American soil,” Altameemi said.
Hasenbein filed a defamation case against F3EA, a private contractor that organized the training exercise, in December 2020, but it was dropped in September 2021 with the agreement of both sides.
It's not clear whether Hegseth, who has publicly supported service members accused of crimes and criticized military leaders for waging a “war on warriors," knew about Hasenbein’s before he hired him, but details of his case are readily available online.
