Rolling Stone reports:

Matt Gaetz may have withdrawn his name from consideration to become Donald Trump’s attorney general over sexual misconduct accusations — but alleged sexual abuser Pete Hegseth is still fighting to persuade Republican senators to confirm him to one of the most powerful positions in government.

Hegseth was already facing an uphill confirmation battle to become the Secretary of Defense given that he is best known as a Fox News host with no government experience. The emergence of a disturbing sexual assault accusation against him from 2017 isn’t helping matters — and Trump’s team is pissed.

According to four sources familiar with the situation, some top Trump transition officials and others close to the president-elect have been puzzled, if not infuriated, that Hegseth did not preemptively inform them of the allegations against him before they made their way into the press — most notably through the publication of a police report detailing the alleged incident at a hotel in Monterey, California.

“How did he not know? Why didn’t he tell us?” a source close to Trump says. “Pete wasn’t interviewing for a job at McDonald’s; this is the fucking Pentagon! … Even if the allegations are fake, it doesn’t matter because he was supposed to tell us what we needed to know so we could be better prepared to defend him — not learn about it from the media.”

There was, the sources say, a vetting process for the Hegseth pick, but it did not uncover these details, nor was it especially invasive. Trump’s transition team did not sign agreements with the White House or the Justice Department to allow the FBI to conduct background checks on the president-elect’s nominees.

“When we ask, ‘Is there anything else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police report,” a Trump adviser says. “Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way — I don’t think — he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.” [Continue reading…]