Drunken Trump nominee caught on stage with strippers

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense reportedly had to step down from a pair of nonprofit veterans groups he headed after workers filed allegations of mismanagement and sexual misconduct.
The New Yorker reports Pete Hegseth was forced out of Concerned Veterans for America, which he worked as president of from 2013 until 2016, after a whistle-blower report that includes an anecdote of him being held back from trying to dance on a stage with strippers.
From the report:
“(It described) him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity — to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report — which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015 — states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups — the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club.”
The report also detailed how another organization he ran “ran up enormous debt” that it was unable to pay its bills.
It comes after documents surfaced that accused him of sexual assault in 2017. A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late.
Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing, the report said.
The Defense Department has a budget exceeding $800 billion, with about 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard, Reserves and civilian employees based worldwide.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Matt Arco may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.