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Sen. Jack Reed (RI), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the FBI background check of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, “inadequate.”
The FBI’s background check on Hegseth did not include material from a woman who accused the candidate of sexual misconduct in 2017.
“You and I have seen the FBI’s background investigation of Hegseth, and I mean the investigation was insufficient, frankly,” Reed told Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) .
Reed stressed that FBI investigators did not have access to key witnesses or an audit of Veterans for Freedom, the advocacy group Hegseth led from 2008 to 2010.
Reed noted in his opening statement that the group had an annual budget of less than $10 million and every year that Hegseth was at the helm, its “expenditures far exceeded revenues, until the organization go bankrupt”.
Reed noted that according to “public reports,” an independent forensic accountant found “evidence of serious financial mismanagement” at the organization.
“There are still obligations from the FBI to talk to people. They have not had access to the forensic audit, which I referred to and to which the person who had access was quite critical of Mr. Hegseth,” he said. Reed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the committee, is asking senators to have access to the testimony of additional witnesses.
“We need to be able to talk to all the people in Hegseth’s history who are raising serious concerns about his fitness to serve,” he told reporters on Monday.
