Free Republic

Court records and documents obtained by The Federalist show there’s far more to the story than the Times lets on.The New York Times recently dropped its latest “bombshell scandal” involving President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth — and it’s about as vapid and toothless as one would expect.“They’re desperately searching for anything to malign Pete,” Hegseth’s lawyer Tim Parlatore told The Federalist. Published on Monday by Times lackies Dave Philipps and Sharon LaFraniere, the hit piece takes aim at Hegseth’s security guard John Jacob Hasenbein, a former Army Special Forces master sergeant. Specifically, the left-wing propagandists detailed a...

Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators: “You could tell he was perfectly OK with killing anybody that was moving.” Such dire descriptions of Gallagher, who had eight combat deployments and sometimes went by the nickname Blade, are in marked contrast to Trump’s portrayal of him at a recent political rally in Florida as one of “our great fighters.”

. . . The violent encounter in a faraway land opened a two-year affair that would pit a Pentagon hierarchy wedded to longstanding rules of combat and discipline against a commander in chief with no experience in uniform but a finely honed sense of grievance against authority. The highest ranks in the Navy insisted Chief Gallagher be held accountable. Mr. Trump overruled the chain of command and the secretary of the Navy was fired. The case of the president and a commando accused of war crimes offers a lesson in how Mr. Trump presides over the armed forces three years...