The Department of Defense appeared to threaten a journalist with Mother Jones after they began asking questions about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and that threat may have been coordinated with a MAGA influencer, according to a new report.
Dan Friedman, a senior reporter with Mother Jones' D.C. bureau, wrote in a new report that he has been asking the Defense Department questions about Eric Geressy, Hegseth's senior Pentagon adviser, who served a tour in Iraq with the Secretary in the 2000s. Friedman said he linked an email address for Geressy to a Goodreads list of lewd books about "Asian wife sharing," two books by Hegseth, and some military history titles. He also asked the Defense Department about a domestic violence charge against Geressy and whether the agency reviewed it as part of his security clearance process.
Hegseth has previously described Geressy as “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” according to the report.
In response, Friedman said he received an email from MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec, who promoted the debunked Pizzagate theory, asking him for comment on whether he has a “creepy fetish for Asian women" for a story Posobiec was writing.
"I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit," Friedman wrote in the report.
"My first instinct was to laugh this off," he added. "Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn’t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids."