Tim Kaine on Pete Hegseth claim he is being smeared: ‘Let me be very plain, that is false’

Tim Kaine tried to get Pete Hegseth, the Fox News talker/Trump nominee to be the Secretary of Defense, to cop to his many transgressions, and his attempts to keep them hidden through NDAs.

Hegseth, predictably, hedged – my favorite line from his Senate Armed Services Committee testimony on Tuesday: “I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully, I’m redeemed by my Lord and Savior, Jesus.”

The classic fallback for fake evangelicals: I can keep doing bad things, because I pretend to be a Chrsitian.

Sen. Kaine, D-Va., talked with reporters after the hearing, and raised a number of troubling issues with the nominee, starting with the stonewalling.

“I have worked with numerous Democratic and Republican Secretaries of Defense, and none have stiff-armed me and not been willing to meet before the hearing,” said Kaine, who has been around for, now, six SecDef confirmation processes, so, that’s a good number.

Kaine also raised issue with the FBI background report on Hegseth that Senate Republicans decided to keep from the view of committee members aside from the chair and ranking member, and that Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the committee, said, according to Kaine, is “insufficient.”

Because of the secrecy and general lack of information, Hegseth has been able to try to claim publicly that the allegations against him involving repeated instances of infidelity, drunkenness on the job and ineptitude in his past roles heading up two nonprofits are “anonymous smears.”

“Let me be very plain, that is false,” Kaine said. “Even on an incomplete record, with what I have been able to see, the allegations of mistreatment of women, financial mismanagement and public drunkenness have names connected to them. It’s unclear whether the investigators ever reached out to those individuals, but there are names connected to these allegations, and the nominee was given an opportunity to review the allegations and respond, and in no instance did the response include any of these names saying, No, that’s wrong, that didn’t happen.”