1. Pete Hegseth worked for several organizations after leaving Iraq, including as an executive director at Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
80 Facts About Pete Hegseth
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Pete Hegseth became a contributor for Fox News in 2014.
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Pete Hegseth served as an advisor to President Donald Trump after initially supporting his campaign in 2016.
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Pete Hegseth has written several books, including American Crusade and The War on Warriors.
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Pete Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate that month, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote, the second time in US history that a Cabinet nominee's confirmation was decided by a vice president after Betsy DeVos in 2017, during the first Trump administration.
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Pete Hegseth is the second-youngest person to serve as secretary of defense, after Donald Rumsfeld, and the first Minnesotan to serve in the position.
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Peter Brian Hegseth was born on June 6,1980, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Pete Hegseth was the first child of Brian and Penelope "Penny" Hegseth.
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Pete Hegseth was raised in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and attended Forest Lake Area High School.
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Pete Hegseth graduated in 1999 as valedictorian and was later inducted into the hall of fame.
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Pete Hegseth played for the school's football team and was a point guard on the basketball team, earning school records in career and single-season three-point shots and single-season three-point shooting percentage.
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Pete Hegseth was twice named all-conference and earned all-state honors as a senior.
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In 1999, Pete Hegseth enrolled at Princeton University, where he majored in politics.
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Pete Hegseth played for the Tigers, and was the publisher and later editor-in-chief of The Princeton Tory, a conservative newspaper.
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Pete Hegseth briefly worked as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Stearns.
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Pete Hegseth completed his basic training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, in 2004, and for eleven months, he was a Minnesota Army National Guardsman at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
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Pete Hegseth began his tour in Baghdad before moving to Samarra, where he served as a civil affairs officer, working with the city council and forming an alliance with councilmember Asaad Ali Yaseen.
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Pete Hegseth has described a near-death experience in Iraq in which a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle, but failed to detonate.
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In 2011, Pete Hegseth was commissioned into the Minnesota Army National Guard as a captain.
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Pete Hegseth volunteered to teach at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan, for eight months, during the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan; he taught one of the final classes at the school.
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Pete Hegseth was barred from serving on duty at the inauguration of Joe Biden after a guardsman flagged Hegseth as an "insider threat", noting a tattoo on his biceps of the words Deus vult.
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Pete Hegseth left the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024, stating in his book The War on Warriors that he resigned over the incident.
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Pete Hegseth began working for Vets for Freedom in 2006 as an unpaid director; by 2007, he was working full-time as an executive director, and by the following year, he became the organization's president.
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In May 2007, Pete Hegseth appeared at a presidential campaign fundraiser for Arizona senator John McCain.
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Pete Hegseth founded MN PAC to support similar candidates, though a third of the organization's funds were given to his friends and family.
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Pete Hegseth began working for Concerned Veterans of America, a group funded by the Koch brothers, that year.
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Pete Hegseth enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, but completed just one semester; he graduated four years later with a degree in public policy.
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Pete Hegseth left Concerned Veterans for America in January 2016 after issues regarding his mismanagement and alcoholism.
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Pete Hegseth told podcaster Shawn Ryan that Trump found him too young to assume the position.
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Pete Hegseth hosted All-American New Year with commentator Lisa Kennedy.
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In negotiations to avert a federal government shutdown, Democrats neared a deal until Pete Hegseth urged Trump not to support a deal that did not include billion for his border wall.
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Trump repeated claims that Pete Hegseth had made correlating video games with mass shootings after two mass shootings in El Paso and in Dayton in August 2019.
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At Fox News, Pete Hegseth was the subject of multiple lawsuits.
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Pete Hegseth was chosen among Fox News's hosts to be featured on Fox Nation, the network's streaming service.
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On Fox Nation, Pete Hegseth hosted The Miseducation of America, a television program criticizing "the Left's educational agenda".
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Pete Hegseth hosted the series Battle in the Holy Land and The Life of Jesus, and the special Battle in Bethlehem, on the service.
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The selection of Pete Hegseth was seen as a sign that Trump sought to appoint a loyalist to lead the Department of Defense, and his relative lack of experience surprised officials within the department.
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Pete Hegseth appeared at the United States Capitol; Trump publicly reaffirmed his support for Pete Hegseth afterwards.
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Pete Hegseth positioned himself as a "warrior" while denying the allegations and his previous claims that women should not serve in combat roles.
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Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the committee's ranking member, noted that Pete Hegseth had used the term "jagoff" in his book The War on Warriors to derogatorily refer to a Judge Advocate General officer who reprimanded him on the use of rocket-propelled grenades.
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Pete Hegseth denied having a drinking problem and pledged not to drink if confirmed.
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Pete Hegseth's confirmation was the second in US history to be decided by a vice president, after Betsy DeVos's confirmation for secretary of education in 2017.
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Pete Hegseth revoked the security clearance and detail of Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and chief of staff of the Army who later became a critic of Trump, and ordered an inspector general inquiry into Milley's tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the inspector general of the Department of Defense, Robert Storch, was removed from his position when Trump dismissed several inspectors general.
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Pete Hegseth renamed Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, its original name honoring the Confederate general Braxton Bragg.
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The Department of Defense invited Jack Posobiec, an alt-right political activist to accompany Pete Hegseth, according to The Washington Post.
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Pete Hegseth moderated his comments the following day, stating that it would be possible for Ukraine to join NATO given Trump's discretion.
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In February 2025, Pete Hegseth ordered officials within the Department of Defense to reduce funding on most initiatives and began a purge from within the department, firing three top judge advocate generals and Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations.
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Pete Hegseth stated that "we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice" rather than "roadblocks to anything".
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In March 2025, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, reported that he had been accidentally included by Mike Waltz in a Signal group chat where Pete Hegseth shared information about attacks in Yemen hours before they occurred.
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Pete Hegseth rejected that war plans were shared and called Goldberg "deceitful" and a "discredited so-called journalist".
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The chat showed that Pete Hegseth posted information including the launch times of F-18 aircraft, MQ-9 drones and Tomahawk missiles, as well as the time when the F-18 aircraft would reach their targets, and the time when the bombs would land.
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That month, The New York Times reported that Pete Hegseth had shared details on the attack in a second Signal chat with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
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At the White House Easter Egg Roll, Pete Hegseth suggested that the revelations were a coordinated smear campaign.
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John Ullyot, the former spokesman for the Department of Defense, wrote in a Politico Magazine opinion piece hours later that the department was in a "full-blown meltdown" and warned that Pete Hegseth was at risk of losing his position.
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Pete Hegseth received criticism from Senate Democrats over alleged civilian deaths in the Yemen strikes.
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Pete Hegseth holds strongly conservative views and is regarded as a Christian nationalist.
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Pete Hegseth described progressives and Democrats as enemies of freedom, as well as the United States and the Constitution.
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Pete Hegseth has said that victory for America includes the end of globalism, socialism, secularism, environmentalism, Islamism, genderism, and leftism.
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Pete Hegseth has repeated false claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election and spread conspiracy theories about Antifa involvement in the January 6 attack.
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Pete Hegseth initially supported Florida senator Marco Rubio in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, but later began to favor Texas senator Ted Cruz and finally Donald Trump.
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In November 2009, Pete Hegseth supported sending additional forces into Afghanistan during the War in Afghanistan.
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Pete Hegseth advocated for withdrawing from Afghanistan in his interview with the National Review, but argued that special operators should remain in the country and that the Afghan Army should be supported to avert a conflict.
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Pete Hegseth has criticized United States military aid to Ukraine.
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In May 2020, Pete Hegseth said the "communist Chinese" want to "end our civilization".
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Pete Hegseth opposed Operation Iron Triangle, a raid in August 2006 that resulted in the death of three Iraqi men, as "atrocities" to an audience at the University of Virginia.
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Pete Hegseth has criticized the US military for accusing soldiers of committing war crimes.
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In 2004, Pete Hegseth married Meredith Schwarz, a graduate of Forest Lake Area High School, at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota; they were voted "most likely to marry" by their graduating class.
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Meredith filed for divorce in December 2008 after Pete Hegseth admitted to five affairs; he had been dating Samantha Deering, whom he had met at Vets for Freedom.
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Pete Hegseth married Deering, with whom he has three children, in 2010; they filed for divorce in 2017.
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The Washington Post reported that Pete Hegseth had paid the accuser as part of a non-disclosure agreement after she threatened litigative action in 2020.
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The Associated Press reported in January 2025 that Pete Hegseth had paid her.
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The accuser told police that she had confronted Pete Hegseth, who informed her that he was a "nice guy", after he had acted "inappropriately" with women at the event.
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Pete Hegseth told police that he had sought to ensure she was comfortable.
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Two women who were interviewed by police stated that Pete Hegseth had put his hand on their thighs and asked them to go to his hotel room, with one woman saying that she had asked the accuser to get him off of her.
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In In the Arena, Pete Hegseth described his Christian faith as initially "more out of diligent habit than deep conviction".
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Pete Hegseth told Nashville Christian Family that he experienced a religious transformation in 2018 after he and his wife, Jennifer, began attending the Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey.
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Pete Hegseth has several tattoos, including one across his right biceps reading Deus vult, a Christian phrase associated with divine providence and God's will, as well as a tattoo of the Jerusalem cross on his right breast; the combination of Deus Vult and the cross has been associated with the Christian right.
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Pete Hegseth co-authored Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation with David Goodwin, the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, in 2022.
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In June 2024, Pete Hegseth published The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.
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Pete Hegseth wrote the foreword to The Case against the Establishment, a book written by Nick Adams and Dave Erickson.