Pete Hegseth served as a National Guardsman in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, earning two Bronze stars. But after President Biden was elected, Hegseth left the military, complaining he was ordered to stand down from his duty guarding Biden’s inauguration because top brass dubbed him a “white nationalist” and an “extremist.”

“The military I loved, I fought for, I revered… spit me out,” Fox News co-host Hegseth wrote in a recent book. “I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore. The feeling was mutual — I didn’t want this Army anymore either.”

The man that didn’t want “this Army” may soon control it.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Hegseth as secretary of Defense, a move that would put a combat veteran who has complained about “woke” forces — and called for the firing of top generals — in charge of the Pentagon.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said Tuesday as he announced the nomination on Truth Social. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice — our military will be great again, and America will never back down.”

A 44-year-old Princeton graduate and staunch Trump supporter, Hegseth has since 2017 been a co-host of the weekend edition of morning program “Fox & Friends,” on which Trump has appeared. He joined the network as a contributor in 2014.

Trump’s nomination of a TV host with no senior military or government experience has provoked incredulity among some veterans and defense experts. The Defense Department, with a budget of more than $800 billion, includes some 1.3 million active-duty troops and 1.4 million more in the National Guard, Reserves and civilian employees.

If his nomination is approved by Congress, Hegseth is certain to bring sweeping changes to the military. He is also likely to put it in the public crosshairs of the culture wars as it confronts global crises including wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

“There is reason for concern that this is not a person who is a serious enough policymaker, serious enough policy implementer, to do a successful job,” said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

“Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history,” Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America, said on X. “And the most overtly political. Brace yourself, America.”

“Wow,” former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger posted on X. “Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.”

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who was ousted in 2019, said his former boss probably picked Hegseth because he saw him as compliant.

“I do think this is a loyalty choice — really, the better word we should be using is fealty choice,” Bolton said in a CNN interview.

Bolton said Hegseth had an “admirable” and “super” military record. But the question, he said, was what Hegseth would do if Trump ordered him to instruct the military to perform illegal acts.

“Give him a chance up to the point when Trump starts ordering the military to do illegal, immoral, unconstitutional things,” Bolton said. “That’s where the real test of Pete Hegseth’s character will come…. What will Pete Hegseth do the first time Trump tells him to put the 82nd Airborne onto the streets of Portland, Oregon?”

Hegseth has already advocated purging the military of top officials, such as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. — or anyone who has advocated for diversity and inclusion programs.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth said on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast when asked how he would reform the military. “Any general that was involved, any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI-woke s— has got to go.”

Over the last few years, many conservatives have criticized the military under the Biden administration. Soon after taking office, Biden rescinded a Trump-era executive order restricting diversity training on systemic racism in federal government, including the military.

Within months, two Republican combat veterans in Congress — Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas — launched an online “whistleblower form” that encouraged military personnel to report examples of “woke ideology” in the military. GOP lawmakers also held a House Armed Services Committee hearing and grilled senior military leaders, including Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, about his decision to add Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” to soldiers’ reading list.

On television and podcasts, Hegseth has repeatedly railed against military leaders. “The so-called elites directing the military today… believe power is bad, merit is unfair, ideology is more important that industriousness, white people are yesterday, and safety! is better than risk-taking,” Hegseth writes in his book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”

“Do we really want only the woke ‘diverse’ recruits that the Biden administration is curating to be the ones with the guns and guidons?” he asks.

Hegseth writes in the book that he was removed from his duty guarding Biden’s inauguration because soldiers scrolled through his social media and spotted a tattoo on his chest of a Jerusalem or Deus vult cross, a historic Christian symbol that in recent years has been appropriated by the far right.

Hegseth contends that the image — which appeared on flags waved by some who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — is a religious symbol that “represents Christ’s sacrifices and the mission to spread his gospel to the four corners of the world.” He got the tattoo, he said, after he saw it on a church while walking in Jerusalem.

In his statement announcing Hegseth as his Defense secretary pick, the president-elect said the book “reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, and how we must return out Military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence.”

Hegseth, who has questioned whether women should be allowed to serve in combat, rails in the book against “diverse recruits, pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies.” When a real conflict breaks out, he writes, “red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy-asses.”

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, whose chamber will vote on the nomination, called the nomination “interesting.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Hegseth would be “reform-minded in the areas that need reform.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Special counsel Jack Smith is asking an appeals court to halt his appeal against President-elect Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified and top-secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The motion was filed by Smith in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and comes months after U.S. Judge Aileen Cannon in July dismissed the case against Trump, which centered on his handling of allegedly classified documents after leaving the White House in 2020.

Smith appealed that decision to the 11th Circuit Court, and the new motion filed Wednesday does not drop his request. Rather, it asks the court to hold the appeal against Trump in “abeyance”— effectively keeping the appeal on the docket, but halting it from being advanced in any capacity.

The filing from Smith comes just two weeks after Trump’s election to a second term, and is in keeping with longstanding Department of Justice policy against bringing criminal charges against a sitting president. 

TRUMP TAPS MATT GAETZ FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL

And it comes just days after Smith moved to vacate all deadlines in a separate 2020 election interference case against Trump in Washington, D.C.

While the charges in both cases have not been officially dropped, they appear to be heading in that direction. Smith said in his filing Wednesday that he plans to give an updated report on the official status of both cases against Trump on Dec. 2.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LOOKING TO WIND DOWN TRUMP CRIMINAL CASES AHEAD OF INAUGURATION

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith addresses reporters after his grand jury has issued more indictments of former President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C.  (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The motion is likely a welcome relief for Trump, who had vowed to fire Smith “within two seconds” if re-elected — ridding him of both a yearlong legal foe and the criminal charges Trump faced following his loss in the 2020 election.

Smith was tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022 to investigate both the alleged effort by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as well as Trump’s keeping of allegedly classified documents at his residence in Florida after leaving the White House in 2020.

Fox News reported earlier this week that the Department of Justice had been looking to wind down its criminal cases against Trump in Washington, D.C., and Florida, citing an Office of Legal Counsel memo that states it is against Department of Justice policy to investigate a sitting president for federal criminal charges and is a violation of the separation of powers doctrine. 

Special counsel Jack Smith speaks to members of the media at the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

The news comes after Fox News confirmed that Smith will be stepping down before Trump takes office.

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general sent a clear signal through Washington on Wednesday that Trump intends for his Justice Department to take a sharp-elbowed, hyper-partisan approach to law and order — one that is both unquestioningly loyal to Trump and openly antagonistic toward his political opponents, legal and political experts said.

That, after all, has long been the approach of Gaetz, a hard-right member of the House since 2016 who is deeply unpopular among his Democratic and Republican colleagues, but has won praise from Trump by being unflinchingly defensive of the former and future president and openly derisive of the various state and federal criminal cases against him.

“If anything shows Trump will make no effort at unity or conciliation, it is this pick,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that Gaetz had submitted his resignation from Congress “effectively immediately,” in the hope that Florida officials can fill his House seat with another Republican by early January and the party’s thin majority in the chamber won’t be diminished as the next Trump administration gets underway.

Others noted that Gaetz’s departure from Congress also draws to a close an ongoing House ethics investigation against him.

Trump’s pick for the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement official has been closely watched, given the stakes. Trump won the election despite being a convicted felon with multiple criminal cases pending against him, and after having promised to use the Justice Department to turn the tables and go after his political foes.

Gaetz, 42, has echoed Trump’s claims that the FBI and others within the Justice Department have been politically co-opted and weaponized in recent years to go after Republicans — including Gaetz himself, who was the subject of a federal sex trafficking investigation that ended with no charges last year.

The probe involved allegations that Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid her to travel with him. The separate investigation by the House Ethics Committee, which will now be closed out, was considering whether Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use” or “sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct,” among other things, the committee said in June.

Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing.

In announcing his selection, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that Gaetz had distinguished himself in the House in part by calling for reforms in the Justice Department, and as attorney general would “root out the systemic corruption” and return the department “to its true mission of fighting Crime, and upholding our Democracy and Constitution.”

“Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System,” Trump wrote. “Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.”

Gaetz called Trump’s nomination “an honor.” He also wrote on X that if ending the “weaponized” Justice Department “means ABOLISHING every one of the three letter agencies, from the FBI to the ATF, I’m ready to get going!”

Gaetz has been on the far-right fringe of the Republican Party in Congress, one among a cohort of MAGA enthusiasts who have caused problems for the broader caucus on more than one occasion — including when they helped orchestrate the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield.

Then-Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) speaks to reporters hours after he was ousted as House speaker in 2023.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, another member of the MAGA cohort, hailed Gaetz as an “incredible choice” and a “total repudiation of four years of tyranny by a government entity run amok” under President Biden.

Others in Congress expressed shock — and dismay — at the news of Gaetz’s nomination. Many, from both sides of the political aisle, suggested Gaetz lacked the moral foundation needed to hold the position, and could face an uphill battle to winning confirmation in the Senate.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a chief Trump antagonist for years who was just elected to the Senate from California and will be sworn in next month, said Gaetz’s nomination “must be rejected” by his colleagues — especially given a recent decision by the Supreme Court that found that presidents enjoy sweeping criminal immunity for actions taken in their official capacity.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) during a hearing at the Capitol in 2022.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

“First the Supreme Court granted a president immunity for weaponizing the Justice Department. Now Donald Trump wants to appoint Matt Gaetz as AG?” Schiff wrote on X. “Confirming him would mean affirming the worst potential abuses of DOJ.”

Several of Gaetz’s fellow Republicans also raised concerns, according to a host of reporting online Wednesday.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Gaetz was not a “serious nomination” and that she looked forward to considering “somebody that is serious.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was “shocked” by Gaetz’s nomination — which she saw as a reminder of why the Senate’s role in confirming presidential nominations for important cabinet positions is “so important.”

John Bolton, who served in every GOP administration since Ronald Reagan’s and was Trump’s national security advisor in 2018 and 2019, called Trump’s pick of Gaetz “the worst nomination for a Cabinet position in American history,” and one Republicans should oppose.

“This is something that falls well outside the scope of deference that should be given to a president in nominating members of the senior team,” Bolton said on “Meet the Press Now.” “Gaetz is not only totally incompetent for this job, he doesn’t have the character. He is a person of moral turpitude.”

How Gaetz’s nomination will be taken up by the Senate is unclear, but it will be an early test for newly elected Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, another mainstream Republican. Trump in recent days has suggested that the Senate should give him unilateral power to appoint all of his nominees through recess appointments, which do not need Senate approval.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. Michael Guest. (R-Miss.), left, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) shown in June.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Trump’s pick for attorney general is widely viewed as one of his most important decisions.

Trump has spent much of the last eight years under criminal investigation by the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies. He is a convicted felon awaiting sentencing in a New York case, and facing additional criminal charges in two federal cases and in Georgia.

Experts say he is eager to install a loyalist as attorney general who will not only fight to end any of those prosecutions that are still active by the time he takes office, but who will protect him against any new prosecutions moving forward and use the criminal justice system to go after Trump’s enemies, including political opponents and the prosecutors who charged him with crimes or pursued civil cases against him or his businesses.

Trump spoke extensively about such retribution on the campaign trail.

Mark Paoletta, a conservative attorney serving on Trump’s transition team, said Monday on X that Trump’s agenda included “stopping the lawfare and persecution of political opponents,” but also “holding accountable those who weaponized their government authority to abuse Americans.”

Trump has repeatedly expressed regret about not appointing people more loyal to him as attorney general during his first term, which was defined in part by the Justice Department’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Trump had two attorneys general during his first term. The first was Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who served on Trump’s 2016 transition team.

Trump became infuriated with Sessions after he recused himself from overseeing the Russia probe, and his top deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to oversee the investigation with independence.

Mueller’s investigation found a slate of communications between Trump campaign officials and Russian agents, but not enough to justify criminal charges against Trump. Still, the probe mired the first half of Trump’s presidency in scandal. Trump ultimately fired Sessions.

Trump also soured on his next attorney general, Bill Barr, who backed Trump through the conclusion of the Mueller probe but broke with him over his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Barr has said that when he told Trump that there was no evidence of election fraud, Trump became furious with him. Barr stepped down in December 2020, just before President Biden was inaugurated.

Barr later said Trump “never really had a good idea of, you know, the role of the Department of Justice [and] to some extent, you know, the president’s role.” Trump has blasted Barr as “gutless” and a “coward.”

Then-Atty. Gen. Bill Barr speaks to then-President Trump as Trump vetoes a bill in 2019.

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

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While not etched in law, political tradition in this country since Watergate has been for the Justice Department to operate independently of the White House. Trump did not follow those guidelines.

In addition to pressuring the agency to pursue certain investigations and not others, and ridiculing his Justice Department leaders and Mueller, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey amid the Russia investigation. FBI directors usually serve a fixed 10-year term, and Comey’s dismissal was the first firing of one since 1993.

Trump and some other legal minds in his orbit have suggested Trump should go after those prosecutors who have targeted him and his companies — including Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has pursued criminal cases against Trump for his incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection and his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort; and Letitia “Tish” James, the New York attorney general who won a massive fraud judgment against Trump for inflating his net worth to win preferable insurance and loan terms.

James recently held a news conference alongside New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in which they said they were ready to fight Trump’s agenda and abuses of power.

Trump has also suggested exacting retribution against several California officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, who recently held a press conference similar to Hochul’s; Schiff, who helped lead the resistance to Trump during his first term, including during both of Trump’s impeachments; and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has long been one of Trump’s most effective critics.

On Wednesday, experts said Gaetz, if confirmed, would be a ready partner in such efforts.

Chemerinsky, of Berkeley Law, said Trump “could not have picked anyone more far right or more a loyalist than Matt Gaetz,” and that there “is every reason to fear that he will be even less independent than Jeff Sessions or William Barr.”

Gaetz is married to Ginger Luckey Gaetz, the sister of major Trump donor Palmer Luckey of Newport Beach. Luckey, a Long Beach native, sold his virtual reality company to Facebook for $3 billion at the age of 21. He hosted major fundraisers for the president elect in the 2024 and 2020 elections.

Gaetz attended a Trump rally in the Coachella Valley earlier this year.

Times staff writer Noah Bierman, in Washington, contributed to this report.