Some Republican senators are “privately hoping” that other controversial Trump cabinet nominees will follow Matt Gaetz’s lead and drop out of the running, according to a report.
Gaetz bowed out of consideration to be Donald Trump’s attorney general last Thursday following intense scrutiny over resurfaced sexual allegations from his past. The former congressman said he was “unfairly becoming a distraction” to the Trump administration’s agenda.
Now some GOP lawmakers are turning their attention to Trump’s cabinet picks of Pete Hegseth, tapped for defense secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr for health and human services secretary and Linda McMahon as education secretary, the Hill reports.
Hegseth and Kennedy Jr are likely to face tough questions over sexual misconduct allegations, which they deny, at Senate hearings next year, while McMahon could be asked about accusations of failing to prevent the sexual abuse of teenage WWE workers.
“My expectation, not just my hope, is that some of these people may be weeded out in the process before they ever get to a hearing,” one Republican senator who requested anonymity told The Hill.
“A president should have some level of deference to who he or she wants in positions that surround them, but that doesn’t mean it’s a free card. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing we’re supposed to do,” the senator added. “That’s why the Constitution matters. It gives us the chance to advise and consent. We just need to make sure we do our jobs.”
A second GOP senator, who also remained anonymous, said that focus was shifting to Hegseth and Kennedy Jr. “There are clear signals from my colleagues that there’s more trouble than just with Gaetz,” the lawmaker told the outlet.
They added that public hearings in which both Democrat and Republican senators interrogate nominees over sexual allegations would be “awful for the Senate.”
Hegseth’s nomination to head up the Pentagon is in jeopardy following an allegation of sexual assault from 2017, which he denies.
A newly released police report revealed previously unreported details about the alleged assault which took place after a Republican women’s conference at the Hyatt Hotel in Monterey, California, on October 8, 2017.
The woman at the center of the allegation told police that Hegseth physically blocked the door to stop her from leaving his hotel room and took her phone away, before sexually assaulting her, according to the report, seen by The Independent.
Hegseth has maintained that the encounter was consensual and, in the police report, he stated “there was ‘always’ conversation and ‘always’ consensual contact” between the two of them.
His lawyer said Hegseth paid the woman in 2023 to head off the threat of a baseless lawsuit. No charges were brought against him.
Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said there was “a lot floating around out there” when asked about the allegation against Hegseth.
“We need to actually be able to visit with him face-to-face, and I know the committee will do a thorough vetting,” she told the Hill.
Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the charges against Hegseth “are concerning to say the least” and added it may be that “this is a president who doesn’t consider those kinds of behaviors to be concerning.”
Meanwhile, vaccine-skeptic Kennedy Jr is embroiled in a sexual misconduct allegation by a former live-in nanny. Eliza Cooney told Vanity Fair in July that she was hired by Kennedy Jr and his then-wife as a part-time babysitter in 1994 to look after the couple’s four children. The alleged incidents took place years later.
In one instance, she recalled him moving his hand up and down her leg under the table during a meeting in his kitchen. “In the back of my mind, I was hoping it wasn’t what it actually was,” she told the outlet.
In a separate encounter, she said a shirtless Kennedy Jr walked into her bedroom and asked him to rub lotion on his back. “It was totally inappropriate,” she told the magazine. At the time, Cooney was 23 and he was 45.
Kennedy Jr has never been charged with any crime in connection to this incident.
And McMahon, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education, was accused in October of enabling sexual abuse that occurred at WWE, which she co-founded with her estranged husband Vince.
The civil lawsuit details allegations of sexual abuse of underage boys by ringside announcer Melvin Phillips. It accuses the McMahons of allowing a “rampant culture of sexual abuse.”
A lawyer for McMahon branded the allegations as false, and she, her husband and Phillips do not face criminal charges related to these claims.
