MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
If you happened to turn on Fox News earlier today, you might have caught an unusual guest on set - a mother who, at times, turned to look directly at the camera to make a plea for her son.
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PENELOPE HEGSETH: And I want people to look at Pete, judge people or understand him for who he is today and to disregard the media. That was seven years ago. Most of it is misinformation.
KELLY: Pete is Pete Hegseth, former Fox News anchor and President-elect Trump's nominee for secretary of defense. The woman you heard speaking there on "Fox & Friends" is his mother, Penelope. She says she wanted to set the record straight about a damning email made public by The New York Times that Penelope Hegseth wrote to her son during his 2018 divorce in which she accused him of routinely mistreating women. Well, among the other journalists who have been looking into Hegseth's record is Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. She's with me now. Hey, Jane.
JANE MAYER: Hi there, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Your reporting cites documents, cites eyewitnesses to alleged sexual impropriety, also financial mismanagement, alcohol abuse. Start with that last one. Tell us what Hegseth's former colleagues told you about witnessing alcohol-related incidents in professional settings.
MAYER: What I was hearing was a fairly alarming catalog of specific instances that his former employees at a veterans organization called Concerned Veterans for America saw and reported. A group of them put a report together that they sent to the managers of this group, and what it describes is about two years' worth of moments where Pete Hegseth was repeatedly inebriated, often to the point of almost blacking out, where he had to be carried to his room. There was one particular description of him at one point as needing to be restrained from getting on the stage at a strip club, where he tried to get up to dance with the strippers, and a female employee had to pull him away. He was about to be thrown out of the club, according to this report - this whistleblower report.
And another instance that was also kind of a standout was one where a different former employee sent a letter to the managers, saying that Pete Hegseth had closed down a bar at 2:30 in the morning in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where he was chanting with another person, kill all Muslims, kill all Muslims.
KELLY: And to be clear, these are sources who you have been in direct contact with, who are recounting these allegations to you?
MAYER: They actually are - people who I've also interviewed, yes.
KELLY: OK. I want to note Hegseth's adviser has weighed in on this. He calls these outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker and added, and I quote, "get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism" - so a denial there from Hegseth's team. Jane Mayer, I want to ask you - from when are the most recent allegations of problematic drinking that you were able to document? Is there any evidence that whatever he may have done years ago - or not done years ago - he has since cleaned up his act?
MAYER: Well, the most recent allegations about his drinking really had been made by NBC News, which did its own investigative report and said that colleagues of Pete Hegseth's at Fox News were concerned about his drinking as recently as a month ago. I focused more on the veterans groups he was running because these are the only organizations he's run, and he was basically shown the door at both of them for mismanagement and conduct.
KELLY: Right. Stay there for a second. These are - the organizations are Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. And among the issues you were reporting on is financial improprieties. What happened?
MAYER: Well, that first group, the Vets for Freedom, was basically some place he started working in in about 2006, 2007. By 2008, he had run it really to the edge of bankruptcy. He had something like close to $500,000 in creditors he couldn't pay and a thousand in the bank. He went back to the donors and said, you know, I need money, or we're going to have to close this thing down. And they gave him some money to tide him over, but they did what they described as castrating him to try to get him from running this organization because he really had so many management problems.
KELLY: Hmm. There's a lot to get through here, but I also want to ask about reports of sexism and a general hostile work environment for women who worked under Hegseth. Can you describe those allegations?
MAYER: Yeah. And they were of interest to me if, in part, because Pete Hegseth has been accused of raping a woman in 2017 - a woman who was running a Republican women's conference in Monterey, California. And so I was interested in whether there was sort of a past history here of any sort. He has denied those allegations, and the police investigated them and did not charge him.
The two people, he and the woman, have different points of view on what happened that night. He said it was consensual sex. She was married. Her family was right there in the same hotel. And he wound up paying her a secret amount of money and having her sign a nondisclosure agreement. And what I could see in this whistleblower report is there are many instances where women felt that they were sexually harassed under his management. And there was actually at least one instance where a woman tried to bring charges against another person in the organization and felt that they were swept under the rug.
KELLY: Big picture, Jane Mayer, this would all be relevant information to consider when hiring anyone for any job. Secretary of defense of the United States is not any job. The post involves managing the nuclear arsenal. It involves sending troops into combat, into harm's way. As you have reached out to senators who will be charged with confirming or not confirming this nominee to run the Pentagon, what do they tell you about the stakes?
MAYER: I mean, people are telling me that they consider this to be really serious - and for obvious reasons. For instance, there's a quote in the story from Senator Richard Blumenthal, who's on the Armed Services Committee and who was there way back in 1989, I guess, in the Senate, when it blocked John Tower's nomination from becoming secretary of Defense for somewhat similar kinds of allegations of drinking and womanizing. And what he said was, you know, we can all feel sympathy for someone who may have a drinking problem - an ongoing one, particularly - but you don't want that person, he said, at the head of the most lethal and possibly the largest military in the world.
The secretary of defense's job is a 24-hour-a-day job. There's not a sort of an after-hours part of it. Emergencies happen in the middle of the night, and, as we all know, it's a dangerous world out there. And so there's a lot of concern about whether someone with these kinds of issues could be entrusted with that kind of power.
KELLY: Hegseth says he spoke this morning to Trump and that the president-elect told him to keep fighting.
MAYER: That is what he has said. And, you know, we're sort of in that moment where all you can say is, we will see. There are reports that six senators on the Republican side say that they're uncomfortable voting for him, which would be enough to sink his nomination, for sure. But now that Hegseth's mom has come out on TV and made a plea for him, we'll have to see if she changed any minds. It certainly - I've covered a number of nominations. This is the first time I've ever seen a mom come out to plea for her son.
KELLY: Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, thank you very much for sharing your reporting with us.
MAYER: So good to be with you.
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