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Dec. 5, 2024 - The Charlie Kirk Show
33:37
Unraveling the Lies About Pete Hegseth
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Hey everybody!
The Red Line is Pete Hegseth.
An update on how Pete Hegseth is doing, what that means, and the curious tale of Joni Ernst.
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It is a breaking and busy news day today.
A lot happening right now on the Hill, the U.S. Senate, as the future of Pete Hegseth and President Trump's nominees hang in the balance.
And it's a bigger question.
The question in front of us is, will the Senate be able to have a pocket veto to be able to tell the president, no, we're in charge, you're not in charge?
It is an ongoing question.
As Pete Hegseth, who should become the Secretary of Defense as an honorable and brave and great man, a patriotic man, will be able to survive the thicket of Senate Republicans.
At the center of all this is an extraordinary test case and somebody that we have not really focused on this program at all over the last couple of years.
Enter Joni Ernst.
Joni Ernst is a senator from Iowa.
Joni Ernst ran as a rebel, as an outsider.
Joni Ernst ran as someone that was going to try to change the business-as-usual process in Washington, D.C., Now, I've actually never met Joni.
It's one of the few senators I have never had a chance to meet.
I don't know her.
I can't speak to her character, how she is.
I'm sure she's very pleasant and very polite.
Joni Ernst, though, has largely flown below the radar.
She does not pick big fights.
She goes with leadership.
She is a neocon.
Joni Ernst believes in invading the world and inviting the world.
Joni Ernst is of the mold of Liz Cheney, And in fact, she palled around with Nikki Haley during this last primary.
She showed Nikki Haley around at the Iowa State Fair.
Joni Ernst, of course, has now made good, allegedly, with the Trump campaign and came and endorsed and all that.
But make no mistake, this is a Liz Cheney type of foreign policy policy.
Politician in the U.S. Senate.
Joni Ernst herself wants to have Pete Hegseth's job.
It's the worst kept secret in Washington, D.C. Joni Ernst wants to become the Secretary of Defense.
And since she wants to become the Secretary of Defense, she has launched a very nasty, below the surface campaign to try and torpedo and thwart Pete Hegseth.
And with that, go against President Trump.
Joni Ernst So Joni Ernst Is now being flushed out and
is being singled out as being the reason why all of a sudden Hegseth is having all these difficulties.
This is Joni Ernst, who was asked a question today of whether or not she supports Pete Hegseth becoming the Secretary of Defense.
Play cut 108. Will you support his nomination?
Well, I did have a very long, lengthy discussion with Pete yesterday, and I do appreciate his service to the nation.
I also am a combat veteran.
So we talked about a number of those issues, and we will continue with the vetting process.
I think that that is incredibly important.
So again, all I'm saying is we had a very frank and productive discussion, Back, back it up.
Hold on a second.
Wait, what is your objection then?
That is military cabal doublespeak.
And for the great patriots in Iowa, I hope you are listening carefully because you are not being represented well by Senator Ernst.
Basically, she is defending a deep state at the Department of Defense.
However, hold on a second.
She won't commit to vote for Pete Hegseth.
But do you know who she did vote for?
And she wasn't alone.
Let's put 109 up on screen.
This is Joni Ernst's boy.
This is Joni Ernst's man right there.
Boom!
Center stage.
Lloyd Austin.
Joni Ernst voted for that man.
Wearing three masks.
Walking through, I think it was the Philippines.
But do you remember when he was hospitalized and his chief of staff didn't tell the president for several days?
And of course, he also oversaw purging thousands of experienced troops to pursue a politically motivated vaccine mandate.
One of which, where Joni Ernst did not fight the fact that tens of thousands of troops got kicked out of the military for not wanting to take the COVID shot.
That is Joni Ernst.
Now, Joni Ernst is not saying one way or the other, but this is the new playbook of what the Senate is trying to do.
The Senate is trying to stop Trump's agenda before it gets to a vote.
Now, Lloyd Austin, who Joni Ernst voted for, and so did Deb Fischer and Hoven and Lankford and Roger Wicker and John Thune, they all voted for Lloyd Austin.
That man up on screen.
They all gave Biden his boy.
They all gave Joe Biden his defense secretary.
They all gave Joe Biden his secretary of defense.
His secretary of state.
However, when it comes to Pete Hegseth, they come up with all of this, well, you know, there's a lot of accusations.
What accusations bother you?
Oh, no, what bothers you, and now we're getting down to the essence, is that Pete Hegseth is focused on the U.S. military on lethality, lethality, lethality.
Ooh, Joni Ernst doesn't like that.
She wants bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy.
Do you see the difference?
Pete Hegseth wants lethality, lethality, lethality.
Joni Ernst wants bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy.
Here's a little bit of a gaggle of around the horn of Lindsey Graham.
of Roger Wicker, who is the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, of them all kind of going around the horn.
Let's play cut 99. There are questions that some members have, and we're going to be working for an answer.
Are you among the members who have questions?
Well, I'm looking to be supportive.
The articles I've read?
Yeah, there's a number concerning.
I don't know if it's true or not.
But he'll go through the process.
He'll be asked about it.
We'll see what happens.
I'm being careful until I hear everything.
I've never had a chance to talk with him or meet with him yet.
And I think that's all part of the very important process.
Okay, but you notice none of them gave that kind of double talk to any Biden's defense nominees?
In fact, we pulled up the roll call of Joe Biden's nominee Lloyd Austin.
Do you know that Lloyd Austin, that joke to our country, he received 93 votes from the U.S. Senate and only two no votes?
Do you know the only two no votes were Josh Hawley and Mike Lee?
And then there were five people that weren't there, that were just absent.
Ninety-three yes votes.
93. Pete Heggseth, if he survives, will probably be at 50 or at 51. Why is it that Republican senators are so excited and move fast to give Joe Biden his nominees, but Republican senators don't want to give Donald Trump his nominees?
What is going on here?
Well, we're going to keep on naming the names and tell you more about the folklore of Joni Ernst and Roger Wicker.
And Deb Fischer.
And this is the red line.
This is not a joke, everybody.
The funding is already being put together.
Donors are calling like crazy.
Primaries are going to be launched.
The old RNC, the old way of doing things is dead, okay?
You think that we at Turning Point Action, Turning Point PAC are just going to kind of wrestle on our laurels?
No, no, no, no.
Again, if you support the president's agenda, you're good.
You're marked safe from a primary.
You go up against Pete Hegseth, the president, repeatedly, then don't be surprised, Joni Ernst, all of a sudden you get a primary challenge in Iowa.
Don't be surprised, Mike Rounds, when you get a primary challenge.
And guess what?
We might be successful in doing so.
We don't get a mandate like this from the American people just to have it thwarted by a bunch of dorks that we never heard of from the U.S. Senate, twiddling their thumbs and protecting the war machine.
Done.
And if we have to fire you through a primary, that is what we will have to do.
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So let me just go back in time here and play a piece of tape from when Joni Ernst originally ran for the U.S. Senate.
This was way back in 2014. And oh, how things change.
And yes, of course, I mean, she looks differently now.
Everyone looks different being in D.C. But it's just the whole vibe of her race in 2014 is that I'm an outsider.
I'm ready to go shake things up.
We're going to go make them squeal.
We had such high hopes for Joni Ernst.
We had high hopes for a lot of these people.
And they go on a mission and they go on a mandate to try and represent voters, and it turns out they just end up being part of the system.
Playcut 116. I'm Joni Ernst.
I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm.
So when I get to Washington, I'll know how to cut pork.
Joni Ernst, mother, soldier, conservative.
My parents taught us to live within our means.
It's time to force Washington to do the same.
To cut wasteful spending, repeal Obamacare, and balance the budget.
I'm Joni Ernst, and I approve this message because Washington's full of big spenders.
Let's make them squeal.
That was the ad back in 2014. It went very viral.
Everyone was very excited about Miss Joni Ernst.
Oh, she's going to make him squeal.
She's going to go fight for us.
Turns out that she was just like Liz Cheney and John McCain and the whole brigade.
All Nikki Haley wing of the Republican Party.
I don't know if she's a pleasant person or a mean person.
I can't speak to her personal character.
Did you know that Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia, Susan Collins...
Susan Collins has a get-out-of-jail-free card for me.
She can do whatever she wants.
Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan all voted for Alejandro Mayorkas, but they have questions about Pete Hegseth.
So, Joe Biden's Lloyd Austin got 93 yes votes and Hegseth is going to have to be a squeaker.
It's because Senate Republicans, many of whom, are more loyal to the regime and more loyal to the DC cabal to the mafia than to their voters.
And one of the things, again, this is not playtime here.
We've been talking about this for quite some time.
It is time for Turning Point Action and, yes, Turning Point PAC. We are going to be launching some primaries, and we do not know what states yet.
But we're going to measure twice, and we're going to cut once.
And, you know, people say, oh, Charlie, they're going to come after you guys.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
The Rana fight, we've been through this a couple times.
It would have come after us.
Come on, bring it in.
Get in line.
And by the way, the MAGA faithful, they want this.
So maybe it's going to be Mr. Crapo or Rish in Idaho.
Maybe we're going to primary Mike Rounds.
Maybe it's going to be Joni Ernst.
Maybe it'll be Tom Tillis in North Carolina.
He's been behaving better because of the threat.
But none of this conversation would be necessary.
I wouldn't have to be like this.
I don't want to have to do this if every one of them said we're voting for President Trump's nominees.
But if we're going to go play patty cake and have to try to cut deals to get our secretary of defense, in fact, that's what somebody said is, well, Trump's going to have to cut a deal.
Cut a deal to get our sec def?
What planet are you living on?
That's like an easy voice vote, get it done, day one, January 20 or 21, 22, you get your secretary of defense.
Oh, we're going to have to cut a deal?
No, we're not going to put up with that.
And these Senate Republicans, it's not as if that they're senators from the blue states.
We're not going to primary Susan Collins.
But Crapo or Rish or whatever in Idaho or Mike Rounds in South Dakota, game on.
Look, the American people gave us a mandate.
They gave us jet fuel.
These are obvious pieces of slander.
We won the referendum.
Joni Ernst did not win the referendum.
Okay, yes, she's elected by the people of Iowa.
Good for you.
By the way, she was in a very competitive Senate race, and Donald Trump made multiple visits in 2020 and bailed her out in a very competitive Senate race.
People don't remember that.
A lot of these people he bailed out.
And then you got James Lankford out there.
We're not done with James Lankford.
I'm telling you, that guy, he has no political future.
If James Lankford was smart and wanted a political future, he'd be like leading the charge.
Pete Hegseth, you have like a Pete Hegseth shirt.
No, no, Lankford is, his political career is dead.
He doesn't know it yet.
It's really remarkable how many Senate Republicans are quick to give Joe Biden what he wants, but are very hesitant to give Donald Trump what he wants.
Donald Trump is standing by Pete Hegseth 100%.
Let's play cut 103, please.
I spoke to Trump this morning, just a few minutes ago.
The support this morning.
How are the meetings going?
Great.
How did the meeting with Ernie Scott?
It was instructive.
The entire regime is very threatened by Pete Hegseth.
Why is that?
He'll kick the woke out of the military.
He'll fix the vaccine mandate situation.
This is the red line.
The Senate does not get to act as if it's this Praetorian Guard that is better than the American people and better than Trump.
We won the referendum.
We presented a referendum to the American people.
We presented a binary choice.
Do you want to go the way to Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin?
And again, these Republicans voted for Lloyd Austin.
These Republicans voted for Merrick Garland.
Roy Blunt, who's gone.
But Bill Cassidy voted for Merrick Garland.
John Cornyn voted for Merrick Garland.
Joni Ernst voted for Merrick Garland.
Lindsey Graham voted for Merrick Garland.
James Lankford voted for Merrick Garland.
Mitch McConnell voted for Merrick Garland.
Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Rounds, Tom Tillis.
Now, let me ask you guys in the audience.
Email me freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you could only choose one U.S. Senator, and they have to be in cycle to primary, who would it be?
I'm curious.
So let's just kind of go through the map.
Idaho is up.
So, Alabama's up, but we like Tommy Tuberville.
Dan Sullivan is up in Alaska, but that's a little risky one because Alaska can be really goofy because of ranked choice voting, and he's been okay.
We'll put that aside.
Tom Cotton is up.
We like Tom, so that wins the side.
Georgia's up, but we don't control any Senate seats there.
Very frustrating.
Ooh!
Joni Ernst is up.
That's an interesting one.
There will be an open Kentucky Senate race, so hopefully we can have a real MAGA conservative in the open Kentucky Senate primary race.
Maine, no touching Susan Collins.
We got some angry emails.
Charlie Susan's the worst.
She's a Republican senator in a deep blue state.
Who else could win statewide?
We have an extra Republican seat that voted for us when we need it for Kavanaugh.
She's fine.
Susan Collins, we're lucky to have 53 seats because Susan Collins.
Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi.
Where are you, Cindy Hyde-Smith?
Have you come out in support of Pete Hegseth?
I haven't heard a thing out of you.
You're on the list.
Open seat with New Hampshire.
Hopefully we can defeat Gene Shaheen.
Awful.
Tom Tillis, who's been behaving better, but don't be fooled by him.
Oklahoma, Mark Wayne Mullen, who's been great for President Trump, and we've developed a friendship.
He's going to be speaking at AmFest, I think, so no need to do anything there.
He's been great.
Mike Rounds, I'll tell you, he's on the list.
John Cornyn is on the list.
And Shelley Moore Capito.
So that's kind of our list right there.
Here's the criteria.
You must be in cycle.
You must be actively define the president's agenda, vocally, repeatedly, and publicly.
You must be a neoconservative, because why would we primary summit if it's not neoconservative?
And you must be from a blood-red state.
We're not going to play around with states that we might lose because the primary goes to weird...
We're not going to do that.
It has to be from states like Idaho.
Idaho is definitely near the top of the list, by the way.
Definitely.
Jim Risch is up.
I've met him once.
Nice enough guy.
This guy's a complete neocon.
He's 81 years old.
Senator Risch, it's time to retire.
We got a great bench in Idaho.
Just retire.
Let us get some fresh blood in there.
And has Jim Risch come out and support?
That would be nice.
Mike Rounds has just been so frustrating.
He did something the other day that really bothered me.
I can't remember what it was.
We tweeted at him.
These guys are so...
They look at themselves as the protectorate of this regime.
Oh, that's right.
Mike Rounds with Kash Patel.
And by the way, the Kash Patel fight is a whole other one looming.
This is just starting, everybody.
That's why this war is ongoing.
This fight is ongoing.
We got Bobby Kennedy to get through.
We got Tulsi Gabbard to get through.
We got Kash Patel to get through.
This is not just the Pete Hegseth thing.
And if the Senate develops a habit as if they are superior to the American people, this pocket veto is just going to continue.
It's the phase two that we've been talking about.
Phase one campaign.
So email me freedom at charliekirk.com.
Out of that list, who do you want to see primaried most?
Has to be on that list, though.
I don't care about their future years.
On that list, who do you want to see?
Email me freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Joining us now is Timothy C. Parlatore, attorney for Pete Hegseth.
Timothy, welcome to the program.
Timothy, there are so many accusations being thrown at Pete right now.
I want to set the record straight.
First and foremost, let's go to this narrative that he mistreats women.
What is the truth?
That is a completely false narrative.
It is something that the media has tried to put out there and they've used some of these false claims to create that.
But the reality is that Pete is somebody who I think is going to be a good champion for everybody in the Department of Defense, men and women.
And so a lot of these isolated incidents, false incidents from years ago, really don't have any bearing on that.
And I'm happy to go through each and every one of these because they're all false.
Yeah, please do.
Please do.
Go one by one.
So let's start with this, you know, the claim of the sexual assault.
That's the most serious claim.
This is something that was investigated by the police, and they went through it.
And they actually did a really good investigation.
I went through the police report, and they started with her statement, and then started to get other statements to try and corroborate it.
And ultimately, the very last statement that they took was Pete's.
He did something I wouldn't normally have a client do.
He spoke to them without me there.
But in this case, it turned out to his benefit.
And so you take her statement.
You know, which is pretty damning unto itself.
But then you try and compare it to everything else that the other people said.
And you know that she's lying.
Because she's sitting there saying, you know, I don't remember anything.
I must have been drugged.
And yet, she leaves the bar at 1.30.
She goes upstairs with Pete.
And she's back in her hotel room with her husband at 4 a.m.
In that very brief period of time, her husband says, no slurred words, steady gait.
She wasn't drugged.
Anybody that knows anything about these date rape drugs, there would have been significant signs at that time.
So she's lying about that.
All of her co-workers are saying in the bar they saw her flirting with him.
The police investigators went to the surveillance cameras and they showed she's the one leading him upstairs.
She's the one grabbing him by the arm and smiling and being seductive.
Hotel employees also confirmed this.
But then you go look at his statement.
His statement, which is something that makes a lot of sense.
But the key to me in reading his statement is at the very end, where he says that after the consensual encounter, they sat down and talked and she was starting to have regrets.
And she said, you know, I didn't go back to my husband's room.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to tell him I fell asleep on a friend's couch and I'm very sorry.
And yet, when you go to the husband's statement, he says that's exactly what she said when she walked in the room.
So the husband actually impeaches her credibility on this fake drug thing and supports Pete's credibility by saying this is what they discussed because this is exactly what she did.
So it is something that the police were able to very easily look at and say this was a consensual encounter.
There was no sexual assault.
They didn't press charges.
That case is completely closed and it's obvious that it was false.
And just how this has continued to grow is remarkable.
The other allegations come from the New Yorker and Concerned Veterans for America.
Let's go through those.
Yeah, so the New Yorker, what they did was they took an anonymous complaint from years ago that somebody, a disgruntled, terminated employee, had written this screed to try and get Pete fired from Fox.
Fox looked into these claims back then.
I represented Pete at the time.
And the then trustee of Concerned Veterans for America wrote a letter to Fox debunking it and saying, no, he wasn't fired for these things.
No, he wasn't pushed out.
Here's the reason why he decided to leave.
They had a philosophical difference of opinion on certain things, and he wanted to build his career at Fox.
It had nothing to do with any of that stuff.
They interviewed, and several of these people have since come on the record With their names, saying that all of these claims about, you know, drunken incidents, you know, strip club, all that kind of stuff, all false.
People who are there.
People who are willing to put their names on it.
Not anonymous, you know, so-called whistleblowers.
And in fact, some of these things, you know, as a criminal defense lawyer, I often say, the best lies is where you take a kernel of truth, Then you change a few facts to try and make it, you know, fit a narrative.
That's what they did here.
So, for example, this story about the strip club of Pete, you know, getting drunk and trying to climb up on stage.
That happened.
But it wasn't Pete.
It was somebody else.
Pete wasn't there.
Pete wasn't at the event.
Pete wasn't even in the state at the time.
So, you have all this collection of statements or allegations that have all been completely debunked by other people, but The New Yorker doesn't care about that.
You know, The New Yorker went and published that without bothering to check and get corroboration because anonymous sources who are willing to say something damaging to the nominee is something that they can use to try and sink the nomination process.
The other allegation comes from Fox that he has some sort of drinking problem.
Your thought, your reaction to that?
And, you know, this again, when the first, you know, when the sexual assault allegation failed, they tried something new.
Now they tried the CVA thing.
That failed, so now it's something new.
Now they have a couple of anonymous, you know, Fox employees who claim these things happened, and yet, You saw yesterday morning how out on X, a ton of Fox News personalities and employees came out on the record with their names saying, I sat next to Pete for the past eight years.
This never happened.
He never smelled of alcohol.
And it is just emblematic of the larger problem here that if you don't have something good to take down this nominee, if you don't have something that's actually solid, you just go with somebody anonymous who's willing to hide behind that anonymity.
And make these false claims.
And I keep asking these journalists, you know what?
If you want me to be able to respond to this directly, tell me who the person is so I can tell you exactly what their problems are with credibility.
And of course, oh, no, no, we have to protect our sources.
We can't allow their credibility to be questioned.
Well, then why don't you go talk to any of these other people?
You know, the New York Times reports about these alleged incidents at Fox.
And when they asked me about it, I said, that didn't happen.
Well, do you have any witnesses?
I said, that's your job.
You're the media.
You want to put out an article.
You have to fact-check it.
It's easy to ascertain who else was there at the time because it was televised.
Call them up.
Or just publish your fake article and wait for tomorrow morning on X to see everybody come out and say, I was there, and the New York Times published another fake article.
Yeah, and so is that it?
So we're getting through a debunked sexual assault thing that's nonsense, some concerned veterans from America that it's debunked, and that he does not have a drinking problem.
I mean, this is what we're spending our time on for Secretary of Defense?
Exactly.
When you strip all the lies away, what you have is that over a decade ago, A bunch of young combat veterans who came back from the war got together and occasionally drank too much beer.
That's not news.
That's not a scandal.
In fact, that's the main revenue model of the VFW and the American Legion.
Totally.
In the hall there.
And guess what?
Every single one of us did.
Okay?
When I got out of the Navy, I drank too much.
My friends drank too much.
But we matured.
Pete matured.
Pete overcame that.
And unfortunately, some of us didn't.
And Pete and I both have lost many friends to suicide that didn't overcome it.
But Pete did overcome it.
And this is why I look at these allegations of past alcohol abuse.
Everybody wants to say that's disqualifying.
I say the exact opposite.
I say the fact that he went through that experience, the stresses of combat, the experiences of that, the effects of that, and using alcohol to self-medicate and cope with that, and then overcoming it the way that he has.
That gives him a greater perspective than any Secretary of Defense we've had in recent history to understand exactly what every single man and woman that's going to be working for him in that department is going through and what they need.
And it's going to give him a much better perspective on how to take care of his people instead of just sitting there in his ivory tower like these, like Austin and Madison, all these guys, passing judgment on anybody that isn't perfect.
Yeah, I just, I mean, again, I want to just say that attacking Pete for having a prior drinking problem, or not problem, but just a prior drinking pattern that he's overcome, when it comes to the military, is very rich.
DC, I think, is the drunkest city in the country.
I think there literally is a study.
That D.C. is the drunkest city.
In closing here, you've known Pete for a while.
He's served admirably.
I know he's fighting like crazy and he's trying to get out of this.
Is there any other accusation that hasn't?
I mean, this is it.
This is the weakest I've ever seen.
Why are Senate Republicans taking this crap seriously?
You know, and this is one of the reasons why yesterday and today Pete and I decided to come out significantly on offense to attack these allegations, because every single one of them has a perfect factual defense.
And I think that that's what these senators need to hear, is they need to hear that defense so that they can be comfortable with this nominee, that all of these things are fake, they're in the past, they have nothing to do With the person that they're talking about putting into the Pentagon, and if anything, his experience of not only overcoming that at the time, but also now his experience of overcoming it right here, when everybody's trying to attack him and he's able to overcome that, that's going to make him a much stronger leader in the Pentagon.
And all he wants is a fair hearing.
All he wants is for the senators to listen to him, ask him the tough questions, give him the opportunity to respond, and then make a decision based on a fair hearing of the actual facts instead of fake anonymous claims.
Timothy, thank you for your time.
Excellent analysis.
Very thoughtful.
Again, it was very helpful to kind of have that all laid out.
Any Republican that doesn't vote for Pete Hegseth will be primaried and will be removed.
Timothy, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
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