Trump's Personal Deep State Gives Hegseth a Free Ride

From Jackie Calmes' 1-16-25 LOS ANGELES TIMES article entitled "The Case of the Missing Hegseth Investigation":

For folks who have so harshly turned on the FBI for supposedly targeting Donald Trump over the years, Republicans sure are quick to turn to the bureau when they need a cover-up, er, background check to salvage a troubled Trump pick for high office.

In October 2018, the beneficiary was Brett M. Kavanaugh. Then-President Trump and a Senate Republican majority directed the FBI to investigate sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee to placate Republican senators whose threatened opposition could sink his nomination.

But as I learned in researching a book at the time, the Trump White House told the FBI whom its agents could contact, ignoring willing witnesses with damning information, and gave them just days to finish. The bureau’s slapdash Kavanaugh report, merely summarizing agents’ interviews without drawing conclusions, was enough political cover for Trump and Senate Republicans to falsely claim he’d been exonerated. Democrats correctly insisted otherwise. Yet it was their word against the Republicans’ since the senators-only report remains secret to this day.

And Kavanaugh, comfortably settled into his lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court, voted last Thursday — fortunately on the losing side — in favor of blocking Trump’s sentencing for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star.

Trump isn’t even back in the White House and he’s already replayed the FBI card — call it the Trump card — and again apparently successfully, this time for his manifestly unfit choice for Defense secretary, former Fox News host and former National Guard officer Pete Hegseth. With another incomplete, half-baked and secret FBI background check related to alleged sexual assault and excessive drinking, Hegseth got through his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday without a dissenting voice from the Armed Services Committee’s Republican majority.

To read the entire article, click HERE.