The FBI background check on Pete Hegseth is a whitewash—and that's on purpose!

As defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth faces questioning today in for his confirmation hearing — the first of the high-profile Trump nominees to do so — he already promised senators this morning, “I sit before you an open book.” That appears to be decidedly untrue. In fact, to the contrary, there’s controversy about how the FBI background check prepared for the US Senate failed to interview Hegseth’s ex-wives or the woman who filed a police report alleging he sexually assaulted here in 2017.

On the surface, that’s insane.

This is a nominee to one of the most important roles in the entire US government who not only faces credible sexual assault allegations, but who apparently also mismanaged, misled, and left ignominiously the only (very low-stakes and small) organization he’s ever actually led. His drinking is such a problem that it worried his colleague at a morning TV show, a far less sensitive and responsible position than he’s currently being considered for, and he’s already had to promise he’d stop consuming alcohol to lead the Pentagon to reassure senators.

His already-thin credentials around the military raise worrying questions too: He’s defended war criminals and been reported for extremism by his peers in the National Guard because he has a tattoo usually associated with white nationalists. This is a man that the National Guard apparently didn’t trust to be one of thousands defending the US Capitol after January 6th who may, in a matter of days or weeks, be in charge of the entire military. This is someone whose own ties to Christian white nationalists places him outside the mainstream of even that already-extreme movement. And that’s before you even get to his apparently long-standing beliefs about how women and minorities don’t have a place in today’s military.

You’d think this is precisely the type of person the FBI should do the most thorough background check on ever imagined. And you’d be right.

The fact that the so-called “FBI background check” for the man slated to head the Pentagon, the $800 billion defense budget, and the nation’s three-million-personnel military failed to talk to the very people you’d expect an investigator to be most interested in speaking with is not a mistake.

But it’s actually not the FBI’s fault.

In fact, that willful ignorance by design — and it bodes ill for how the incoming Trump administration is looking at the biggest threats to its nominees.

Let’s back up and understand some background about background checks.

First, not all FBI background checks are created equal. There is, in fact, a standard protocol for run-of-the-mill background checks—a checklist of specific actions that agents take and investigate when conducting standard security checks. This is probably what you think of when you think of an FBI background check — agents go back and interview coworkers, friends, high school and college classmates, ex-romantic partners, and root around places where you’ve lived to talk to neighbors. If you live in Washington long enough or have friends with sensitive jobs, you may have had the unexpected agent show up at your workplace or home and run through a pretty rote series of questions about a friend or colleague when they’re up for a new job or a security review. It’s rote, but thorough.

But, ironically, an “FBI background check” for a high-profile job isn’t like that. Instead, the FBI treats the most sensitive, high-level, high-profile background checks it does like consulting work — it’s effectively been asked by a client to perform a specific task and service. The FBI lets the *client* — in this case, the incoming Trump administration — decide how much to dig and where to dig into a background check. As such, the bureau operates within someone else’s parameters and doesn’t stray beyond the limitations set by that “client.”

The reason for that has to do with the legal wrinkles of the Bureau and its powers and authorities. Background checks are fundamentally different than any other investigation the FBI performs because everything else the FBI does is a criminal or national-security investigation — those cases rely on specific “factual predication” before the FBI can open a criminal or national security investigation. But a background check lacks that factual predication standard and so, rather than creating a situation where the government just throws open the door to let the FBI root through someone’s life, they only go as far as the client wants.

Effectively that means the FBI didn’t ask a single question in Pete Hegseth’s background check that the incoming Trump administration didn’t want asked.

That’s troubling for all the obvious reasons, given Hegseth’s track record, but even more so because there’s another oddity in his background: This is the first time he’s ever been up for a Senate confirmation. You have to go back sixty years, to Kennedy’s choice of Robert McNamara, to find a defense secretary nominee who wasn’t already a senior military leader, senior Pentagon official, or veteran Member of Congress (or sometimes two or even all three of those!) before being nominated to be Secretary of Defense. You’d think given the sparse resume and unstudied background everyone involved would want an extra-close look at Hegseth — but the Republican Party clearly wants to whitewash any look at his past.

We actually saw the same dynamic play out with Brett Kavanaugh.

You may remember that after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with allegations she’d been assaulted by then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the FBI did a new background check on Kavanaugh that cleared the way for Republicans to confirm him for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. We now understand that even as the Trump White House said the FBI had “free rein” for their background check, it was effectively a whitewash.

The FBI did not speak with people who sought out the bureau to share their experiences with Kavanaugh. The results of the“tip line” that the FBI set up — the first time it had ever done so with a nominee, an effort that resulted in 4,500 tips — actually was just handed over unstudied to the White House, not investigated by agents independently.

That new, incomplete, and decidedly unthorough FBI background check — it only included a total of ten new interviews — effectively (and not surprisingly) cleared Kavanaugh, and gave the Senate Republicans the political cover necessary to confirm him. A 32-page report by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, issued last fall, concluded, “Far from getting to the bottom of the allegations against Kavanaugh, the supplemental background investigation performed by the FBI raised additional questions about the thoroughness of the FBI’s review and whether its scope had been purposely curtailed.”

The fact that the US Senate is now getting played a second time by incomplete and inadequate background checks should be a huge warning flag about the looming corruption and abuse of power by the incoming administration.

You may remember that the transition delayed even asking for background checks until after so many troubling allegations came about its nominees that Republican senators said they wouldn’t proceed without formal background checks.

That delay alone was a dire warning sign about the green light for corruption, misdeeds, and self-dealing anticipated by Trump inner circle.

Normally, transitions and administrations want desperately to know potential personnel vulnerabilities in advance. The entire point of a security check is to determine whether someone is already ethically compromised or has potential areas that an adversary could leverage to compromise them — from hidden affairs to gambling problems to substance abuse. At a fundamental level, a security check is about whether a potential nominee is worthy of public trust. You generally, as a point of good government, don’t want senior officials in sensitive positions open to compromise or blackmail.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, sees background checks differently — they want to hide and obfuscate the misdeeds, liabilities, weaknesses, conflicts-of-interest, corruption, and points of existing or potential compromise of their nominees until they’re safely ensconced in the highest level of the US government and already reading the nation’s most sensitive secrets.

One big question this raises for me is why and how Chris Wray is letting the FBI get used a second time to launder serious allegations about critical presidential nominees?

The FBI talks endlessly about its three core values: “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.” Here’s a situation where the incoming presidential transition is taking advantage of all three values and the public reputation of the FBI — using the cover of the bureau’s integrity and its reputation for thoroughness to “reputation launder” its nominees to the US Senate and the general public.

Why isn’t FBI leadership speaking more loudly and clearly (even anonymously!) that it’s not really able to investigate these nominees on the public’s behalf? You’d think that Chris Wray, who has already decided to presumptively quit, might be willing to make a stand for the bureau’s reputation and ensure that the public understands the bureau isn’t vouching for these individuals by reporting background checks to Congress.

Passing an “FBI background check” means something to the general public and should mean something to the general public — but that’s not what we’re getting right now as citizens. The US Senate should demand better, more thorough, and more unvarnished background checks going forward if it’s to accept them as part of the confirmation process. Otherwise, we’re only going to learn of problems when it’s too late….

GMG

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