'He doesn't check any boxes': Dem senator gives withering assessment of top Trump pick

Some Senate insiders, including Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), are blowing up Pete Hegseth's nomination for Secretary of Defense citing his lack of qualifications a day before the former Fox News host's confirmation hearings are set to begin.

Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large with The Intelligencer, quoted Kelly's devastating take on Hegseth in a column posted Monday.

"I don’t expect any candidate to check every single box. But he doesn’t seem to check any boxes,” Kelly said.

Traister also quoted an anonymous Senate aide regarding the Trump nominee's "thin" resume.

“The problem is not that you don’t have this line on your résumé. The problem is that the thin lines you do have, you were bad at them,” the aide said.

At least one Senate aide told Traister that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee shouldn't focus solely on Hegseth's lack of qualifications for the job, "given the enthusiasm of the American people for outsiders who could be brought in to clean up bloated and dysfunctional institutions, including the Pentagon."

The aide said, “There is a case for an outsider to fix a Pentagon that everyone understands can’t pass an audit. I think most Americans are like, ‘How do we spend as much money as this?’”

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Traister concluded, "Pete Hegseth is, by every measure, an abysmal nominee to run the American military. The Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News commentator has no experience managing enormous, complex organizations like the Pentagon and would, as secretary of Defense, be in charge of an $850 billion budget and 3 million active-duty and civilian personnel."

Traister then broke down the controversies plaguing Hegseth.

She wrote, "His spotty professional record includes having been asked to step down from two nonprofit veterans’ groups whose budgets he reportedly ran into the ground. Questions about his personal behavior abound: He has been accused of rape (he reached a civil settlement with his accuser in 2017) and has a reported habit of excessive drinking, including while on the job and to the point of incapacitation in public. He has defended waterboarding and torture, advocated on behalf of alleged war criminals, and as recently as November he declared, 'I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles.' Even Republicans haven’t been able to find much good to say about him. 'If it were a secret ballot,' one moderate senator told me, 'I don’t think he’d be confirmed.'

Hegseth's confirmation hearing is set to begin at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday.

Read The Intelligencer article here.