Bill Kristol and Margaret Donovan: Hegseth Should Be Impeached

The Bulwark Podcast

Bill Kristol and guest Margaret Donovan, a former JAG officer and combat veteran, argue that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's tenure is marked by rampant politicization, merit-based promotion reversals, and constituti

Key takeaways

• Hegseth fired senior officers like Admiral Lisa Franks and General Randy George not for performance but political alignment

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:12) Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to the The Bulwark podcast. I am not Tim Miller, as you've probably noticed, and I'm happy to be pinch hitting, however, for Tim Miller as he finishes up his little break. And he'll be back on Monday. You'll be glad to hear. And I think the Bullwark podcast will be dark tomorrow. So this is our last non-timilar podcast. The pressure's on me and our terrific guest, Margaret Donovan. I think Margaret can live up to this. I'm not sure. I can handle the pressure. But Margaret is teaches at. Law School, and it was in private practice there, was an army captain in the Army and the Judge Advocate General's Corps in the 2010s. It was a JAG in Iraq and Syria in 2016-17, I think. So it was right in the middle of the fighting there against ISIS and gave a lot of legal advice to people who were involved in that war and not a lot, really a ton, right, in day-to-day, every day, I think. And so has real familiarity with the Defense Department, where you served six years, but also with combat and its strains on the laws of how it interacts with wars and the laws of war. And you teach about that and comment on that now, both in print and on other media. So thanks, thanks Margaret, for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Now, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've learned stuff from you over the last year and I will today. So let's, I want to get to Iran, obviously, because there's a lot of issues on Iran. You've been, you've spoken on several. of them and also the drug war before Iran, raises all kinds of issues of, but I want to talk more broadly about the Defense Department under Pete Hex-eth, under in the second Trump term, because I've been a little, well, I'm very much an outsider looking at it, but I've talked to people who are there and have been there and are close to people who are there. And I'd say they're more alarmed than I think they expected to be by the state of politicization, professionalism, honesty even, in terms of communicating to the public at DOD. And I'd like to get your thoughts on that. Maybe use the begin, though, with this New York Times story from just a couple of days ago of how Admiral Coddle became Chief of Naval Operations, which happened a year ago. But pretty stunning account of how he got himself that job. And remember, Hegseth had come in and fired, right, the CNO, and as well as, so as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and many other general officers. So, I mean, you know how this works. You've been close to it and still are in touch with people. give us a sense of what you thought reading that Times story. Maybe you knew a lot of that already, but what does it tell us? I mean, the time story on Admiral Cottle and the sort of evolution of how he got to the position he's in, I just think is really fascinating because it's like this little microcosm of, you know, a lot of different problems that people are seeing in the military right now. You have these legal conflicts of interest. You have what appears to be not an entirely merits-based promotion. And then in the center of it all, you have a highly qualified officer who was ousted, Lisa Frankelly, who's a vice admiral in the Navy. And, you know, I think just like taking a step back, thinking about the context in which this particular chain of events happened, as the time story outlined, basically Admiral Franquette was like, you know, knew there was a political wave coming. And basically, as the reporting states, kind of gathered some of her subordinate leadership and her key players and was like, look, everybody, focus on the mission. There's going to be this political wave rolling through and like remember what's important. It's the people and the mission and, you know, making sure that we stay eyes forward and staying focused. And supposedly, according to the story, Admiral Cottle was actually in that group, in that audience. and the sort of, I guess, really sort of clever way maybe that the Times wrote that made you think that Caudill heard that and thought, wow, there's a political wave? Like, how can I ride that? And then sort of separately tried to coordinate with Hegseth's people as he was getting ready for his nomination hearing. So the backdrop to all of this is that Secretary Hegseth has been firing people, summarily firing military officers, very senior, very experienced military officers, or otherwise kind of forcing them into retirement in situations where they were normally advanced into leadership positions. And he's doing so not based on merit, not based on the entire body of their life's career and their life's work, not based on their officer evaluation reports, something called an OER, which is basically an annual review that allows you to advance in the military, not based on their combat records, not based on their command time, not based on the schools they've been to the awards that they've earned, but instead based on as near as anybody can tell this like internal judgment that he has, that their politics don't align with his. And the irony of that from a guy who has really campaigned for this job by saying that the military is filled with woke promotions and people who don't deserve, to be where they're going to be and women don't meet standards and standards are lowered for women going to combat and we've got to just make one standard for all and that's how the military should be. The irony of the guy who has been pushing that to then fire people not based on merit or not based on their careers, based on something entirely political is just kind of astounding. The other sort of like culturally offensive part of this, which I don't really even think you have to have served in the military to understand. The people that are getting fired are true leaders, like completely respected, battle tested. They have, you know, dust on their boots, so to speak. They have seen action. They have experienced far more in their military careers than Pete Hexef could ever have dreamed of in his. And there are, you know, some striking differences. I think people chalk up Secretary Hexeth's career, you know, as like he's a National Guard major. And, you know, I think his sort of defenders will say, well, he's, you know, he knows what the average Joe is thinking. And there's some, like, value to that. I, you know, I don't, I don't want to really denigrate anybody's military career because at the end of the day, everybody who served raised their hands to do so. But you have to understand that he has never been in command. He has never planned it like an operation in a combat environment. He has never managed a major budget, and he certainly hasn't been planning for like logistical preparations for major operations. And so you have somebody who like, yes, he served in the military, like I served in the military. You know, it doesn't really qualify him. You want to be looking for something else within his professional background that would make him ready for the job that he has. And so by contrast, you have these very senior people getting jettisoned who could be there to help him. He could turn to C.D. Donahue, who was sort of famed and completely, you know, adored and really revered Special Forces senior officer. He commended Delta. He committed the 82nd Airborne, 18th Airborne Corps. So he's been in command in all of the sort of major story military units. Randy George, of course, the JAG officer. the top military judge advocates right off the bat. He fired all of these people. And so you can be inexperienced and be the Secretary of Defense. I actually truly believe that as long as you are surrounding yourself with people who have experience and you're listening to those people and you know how to take advice and sift through different recommendations. Secretary Hexath is basically not doing that. He's surrounding himself with people who aren't going to push him on anything and aren't going to challenge anything he's thinking and basically kind of building a little cadre of yes men. So with Admiral Caudill, you have this scenario where Lisa Frankelly gets pushed out. Lisa Franketti, you could read her bio on any random website. This is an extremely qualified military officer who had been a deputy chief of naval operations, which means like she was completely primed for the gig that she had as the chief of naval operations. And, you know, the other thing that I alluded to this a few moments ago, but the idea that your secretary Hexeth can come in and say, like, you only got that job because you're a woman. You only got that job because you're a minority. So I'm going to take you out and level the playing field. That ignores the fact that these people are wearing multiple stars by the time he fires. So we're talking about multiple administrations throughout their decades-long careers that people have objectively looked at them, not just about. an administration, not just the Obama administration. We're going through Trump One, where Admiral Franketti held, again, leadership positions. We're talking about George W. Bush. And in some cases, we're talking about people whose experience goes back, you know, to Clinton. And so it's just a very short-sighted view. And it's the tell to me of, like, why these aren't actually merit-based. It's because he's just ignoring the fact that in order to get your third or fourth star, you had to have first gotten your first or your second or pinned full bird or, you know, done the entire, you know, promotion before getting there. So that is sort of, you know, the odd part of Admiral Caudill's sort of elbowing his way into his position into Lisa Frankelly, Admiral Franketti's old position. One thing I love about summer is how easy everything feels. The days they're just, you know, they're a little bit more relaxed, find myself reaching for some comfortable go anywhere pieces again and again. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on well-made essentials and naturally become. those everyday staples that you actually live in all season long. 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And, you know, maybe then you have a talk with them and say, look, I think it's probably not going to work great. And you should, you know, leave after the end of this tour or at the end of a few months or something like that and take retirement. But that wasn't the way it was done. I do feel like there was a lot there of just pure intimidation. I mean, it was somewhat random almost too. I mean, they happened to be disproportionately minorities and women. So that part isn't random. I was going to say. Well, no, that's fair enough. It wasn't random. The individual, so to speak, it was a lot of it was, this is different. This is not the deference to the system that used to prevail, really in all administrations. And there were times when people reached in, Bob Gates reached in and others and thought that the