This has to be one of the more pathetic attempts to pretend to “both sides” the sexual assault accusations against Hegseth and Trump that I’ve seen in quite a while.
I’m not sure why CNN thought they were doing their viewers any sort of favor by bringing on Trump apologist Tricia McLaughlin for this segment, and they really do need to get their act together with who is invited on as a guest.
Trump employees who are willing to lie for him as part of their job, or in the hope of future employment do nothing but misinform the public.
Sadly, that was once again the case during the segment above. Here’s the back and forth where Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky had to remind McLaughlin about why Hegseth isn’t qualified for the job Secretary of Defense, along with the fact that the accusations of rape or sexual assault aren’t his only problem:
ROGINSKY: Pete Hegseth has many problems in addition to what you just said. Pete Hegseth, when he was at Princeton, published an article that said that women who are raped while they’re passed out, actually, that’s not really rape, because if they can’t consent, if they’re not aware of what’s happening to them, that’s not rape.
I mean, this is somebody who is going to be in charge of a military that has had massive sexual assault scandals. To be very clear, on both sides of the aisle, this is something that people have been looking into, senators on both sides of the aisle. It’s a problem. And if you speak to women who have served in the problem, they say it’s a question of not if but when they will be sexually assaulted.
To have somebody like this as the leader of our military, who, by the way, I think also, because of his own personal life and his failure to disclose certain details of that to the White House and to others, is really ripe as an intelligence compromised human being. I mean, the bottom line is this is exactly the kind of person that should not be serving in a national security capacity because this is the kind of person who has things that he doesn’t want coming out that our enemies are probably already aware of.
Surely, Tricia, surely there is somebody in the Trump Organization and the Trump orbit who doesn’t have sexual harassment issues that they can put into this job. It does not need to be Pete Hegseth.
Which was followed by useless flack Tricia McLaughlin trying to pretend Hegseth’s real issues — where he was credibly accused of sexual assault — was the same or equal to some Russian disinformation on Biden:
MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I have to note, though our current commander in chief, Joe Biden, has sexual assault allegations against him. He is the leader of our country. He’s the leader of the military. So we can go through this all day. But there’s multiple people who face these allegations, whether they be true or not. We need to make sure that there’s sound investigations without — I mean, without coming to sweeping.
ROGINSKY: OK, but he didn’t disclose. He did not disclose to his own people.
MCLAUGHLIN: You’re saying he didn’t disclose to the transition team.
ROGINSKY: He did not disclose to anybody. And that if I were the Trump administration, if I were Susie Wiles, if I were the whoever was doing the vetting on him, I would be furious. Why not disclose something? Why is it that that, apparently, Donald Trump had to find out, along with the rest of us, that there is a credible allegation of sexual assault?
And by the way, I think we all know that sexual assault is incredibly hard to charge. It’s incredibly hard to prosecute for reasons that are obvious. One person says a, and another person says b. As a result of that, you can’t really figure out what happened.
MCLAUGHLIN: As Tara Reade did. As Tara Reade —
ROGINSKY: OK, Tara Reade is now — Tara Reade is now living in Moscow working for Vladimir Putin. So I think we understand where that’s coming from.
But look, this is a Republican woman at a Republican conference who accused Pete Hegseth of this. This is not some Democratic deep state plant —
MCLAUGHLIN: Where there are no charges, and this was eight years ago. It must be —
ROGINSKY: Listen, I worked — listen, I worked with Pete Hegseth at FOX. And let me tell you something, Pete Hegseth has issues above and beyond this that need to be examined, because Pete Hegseth has a problem where he goes out and he gets drunk, and that’s also not something that we need necessarily need in our Department of Defense and the person leading our military. So I would just say I like Pete on a personal level. Surely there are people who are more qualified than he is.
SIDNER: Julie Roginsky, Tricia McLaughlin, thank you both for talking through that with us.
All they have is projection. I look forward to Hegseth’s nomination going up in flames. I hope he stays in long enough for hearings so he can end up losing his gig at Fox as well.
