According to the FT, Hegseth’s broker’s request was flagged internally at Black Rock, presumably because it so obviously threatened to trigger an insider-trading investigation. (I’m guessing the FT’s three sources all worked at Black Rock.) Ultimately, Black Rock denied the request on the technicality that its Defense Industrials Active ETF was not yet available to Morgan Stanley clients. Whether Hegseth found some other way to profit from the Iran war remains an open question. (A Pentagon spokesperson called the FT report “entirely false and fabricated” and denied that Hegseth or any Hegseth representative approached Black Rock.)
It says a lot about our current scandal-rich environment that the FT story hasn’t dominated the news these past three weeks. But congressional Democrats certainly didn’t forget it. The day after the story broke, the House Committee on Government and Oversight Reform’s ranking member, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, and the ranking member of its Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, sent Hegseth a letter instructing him to preserve “all documents, records, and communications” on his financial transactions back to November 1, 2024. Regrettably, no investigation by their committee is likely, because its chair, James Comer of Kentucky, is perhaps the most shamelessly partisan hack in the entire Republican House majority. As I write, Comer is trying to justify Pam Bondi’s evading a committee subpoena in its Jeffrey Epstein investigation despite the fact he previously voted to hold the Clintons in contempt for defying committee subpoenas in the same investigation.
In her new letter, Warren observes that failure on the SEC’s part to investigate the FT allegations would undermine “the confidence investors around the world place on the integrity of our markets.” Granted, Hegseth’s broker was not able, the FT reported, to complete the offending insider trade. But securities law, Warren points out, doesn’t just ban securities fraud; it also bans attempted securities fraud. The relevant language is “Whoever knowingly executes, or attempts to execute” [italics mine] the fraud in question.
One answer is that Hegseth has already given us plenty of reason to believe he’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic. The most hilarious recent example (there are many) was Hegseth’s recitation last week of Scripture that turned out to be a fictional embellishment memorably recited by Samuel L. Jackson before he blows a few yuppie deadbeats’ brains out in the great Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction. Thank goodness Hegseth skipped the part where Jackson asks the yuppies whether they think his employer, the terrifying mob boss Marcellus Wallace, looks like some sort of bitch.
Now you’re going to tell me none of this matters, because Hegseth entered the Trump administration a rich man. A $3.4 million house should be no stretch for a guy whom Fox paid, during the three years before he entered Trump’s Cabinet, $4.6 million. Hegseth also raked in more than a million per year through book advances, royalties, and speaking fees. But in spite of all that, Hegseth doesn’t seem to have much of a cushion. The giveaway is that $19,000 per month mortgage. A payment that big means the size of your loan exceeds the $750,000 cap on mortgage interest deductibility, driving up your tax bill, and you know how much Republicans hate to pay taxes. If Hegseth is paying $19,000 per month, that means that when he bought his house four years ago he was unable to make an appropriately large down payment. And indeed, according to Forbes, Hegseth’s net worth turns out to be only about $3 million, of which $2 million appears to come from his wife, Jennifer Rauchet. If, after being a TV personality for more than a decade, you end up with an individual net worth of only $1 million, then something must have gone wrong.
Alimony appears to be at least part of the answer. Hegseth is twice-divorced, and (again, according to Forbes) just one of these divorces, from Samantha Deering, has cost him $1.3 million in alimony, child support, and private school tuition. Hegseth also paid $50,000 to settle allegations (that he denied) that he committed sexual assault in 2017.
“There’s a long pattern,” one Hegseth associate told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in December 2024, “over more than a decade, of malfeasance, financial mismanagement, and sexual impropriety. There’s a fair dose of bullying and misinformation, too.” Don’t forget that in 2019 Hegseth’s mother emailed him that he was “an abuser of women … We are broken by your behavior and lack of character.” It would be a surprise if none of this mayhem showed up in his personal finances.
Hegseth might especially consider this sort of reckless move after a few drinks. That may sound like a cheap shot, but the New York Post reported earlier this month that Hegseth’s top aide, former Marine Lt. Col. Ricky Buria, told Pentagon colleagues that he went with Hegseth, in disguise, on a secret bender last year at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Multiple sources told the Post that this was Buria’s clumsy attempt to ensnare leakers. But that would be a really clumsy attempt, because Buria set the trap on at least two colleagues. If one of them leaked, how would Buria know which it was?
And yet. I note with interest that Buria—who previously embarrassed Hegseth by telling Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll never to stand President Donald Trump alongside a Black female at a military event (this according to a March report in The New York Times that Buria denied)—did not, after the Post bombshell appeared on April 3, get his sorry ass fired. Might that tell us Buria and Hegseth share what Trump, circa 2003, called a “wonderful secret,” in this instance about knocking back a few?
In any event, it shouldn’t be hard to prove the FT story true, if only someone with subpoena power will take an interest.
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