U.S. Army veteran Paul Rieckhoff ripped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for displaying “conduct unbecoming” after he lashed out at his former Fox News colleague Jennifer Griffin for asking about U.S. bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites.
“He looks rattled, he obviously looks thin-skinned, he’s extremely aggressive and volatile, and he’s attacking the press,” Rieckhoff told CNN. “We need him to attack our enemies. I wish he attacked Vladimir Putin as aggressively as he attacks CNN and others.”
Hegseth is one of a number of officials in Donald Trump’s administration, including the president himself, who has lashed out at journalists in recent days after a leaked initial assessment contradicted Trump’s claims that Saturday’s bombings in Iran “totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities.
Following a classified briefing Thursday, Democratic senators largely appeared skeptical of the bombings including Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who said the strikes “only set back the Iranian nuclear program by a handful of months.”
Rieckhoff, founder and CEO of the political advocacy group Independent Veterans of America, underscored that Hegseth has continued to “conflate the war with the warriors” while leading the Pentagon.
“It’s something we worked hard as a nation across partisan lines to separate after Vietnam, to separate the politics from the people and they have melded the two together,” said Rieckhoff, who served in the Iraq War.
He agreed with CNN’s Abby Phillip who, earlier in the program, argued that Trump officials are using the military to “shield” the commander in chief.
“Because the press is asking hard questions of our president doesn’t mean anything about the troops,” Rieckhoff said.
“It’s entirely separate and they’re using it consistently as a very dangerous shield, which continues to politicize our military, which is their playbook now, which is very, very dangerous,” he added.
Rieckhoff acknowledged that he doesn’t know whether the nuclear sites were “obliterated” in Iran.
“But I do know what is being obliterated — the Constitution,” he said before knocking Congress for failing to fulfill its “responsibility to rein in” a president engaging in combat and urging Trump to make his case to the people first.
He continued: “There’s an old adage: first commit the country, then commit the troops. When you do it backwards, this is the kind of stuff that starts to happen.”