Politics

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Ad wars in the hotly contested race for control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court are beginning.

Republican-backed candidate Brad Schimel is launching a $1.1 million television ad buy statewide on Tuesday, marking the first spending on TV ads in the closely watched race in the presidential swing state.

Schimel, a Waukesha County judge, faces Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford in the race for an open seat on the state’s highest court. The election is April 1.

If Crawford wins, liberals will maintain their 4-3 majority until at least 2028. If Schimel wins, conservatives will win back the majority they lost in 2023.

The race that year shattered national spending records in a judicial contest, with more than $51 million spent on both sides, based on a tally by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. The group, which tracks spending on campaigns, is estimating that a new record will be set this year.

The two candidates in this year’s race have raised more money so far than at the same point in the 2023 campaign.

Crawford last week reported raising $2.8 million from individual donors since getting into the race, compared with $2.2 million for Schimel.

Spending by outside groups, including the Democratic and Republican parties, is expected to far exceed what the candidates spend.

Races for Wisconsin Supreme Court are officially nonpartisan, but partisan interests line up behind their preferred candidates. The Wisconsin Democratic Party has endorsed Crawford, and Schimel is a former Republican attorney general who supports President-elect Donald Trump. Schimel served one term from 2015 to 2019.

The liberal-controlled court delivered a major win to Democrats in 2023 by striking down Republican-drawn legislative maps. Pending cases backed by liberals seek to protect abortion access in the state and impede Republican attempts to oust the state’s nonpartisan elections leader. A looming fight over the future of public sector union rights also has intensified interest in the Supreme Court race.

Schimel’s ad that launches on Tuesday will run on broadcast and cable TV in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, La Crosse and Wausau, his campaign said Monday.

The winner of the April 1 election will serve a 10-year term.

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By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican allies in the U.S. House of Representatives are trying to build support for a bill on authorizing talks for the purchase of Greenland, according to a copy of the bill circulated for co-sponsors on Monday.

The bill is called “Make Greenland Great Again Act,” the offices of Republican U.S. representatives Andy Ogles, who is leading the bill, and Diana Harshbarger said. The copy of the draft was reported earlier by Fox News Digital and had 10 co-sponsors as of Monday morning.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

Trump says he wants to make Greenland a part of the United States and does not rule out using military or economic power to persuade Denmark to hand it over. Republicans won a narrow majority in the House and Senate in the Nov. 5 U.S. elections.

KEY QUOTES

The bill, if passed, will allow the president to enter into negotiations with Denmark on Jan. 20, when Trump takes office.

“Congress hereby authorizes the President, beginning at 12:01 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 2025, to seek to enter into negotiations with the Kingdom of Denmark to secure the acquisition of Greenland by the United States,” the bill’s draft says.

“Not later than 5 calendar days after reaching an agreement with the Kingdom of Denmark relating to the acquisition of Greenland by the United States, the President shall transmit to the appropriate congressional committees the agreement, including all related materials and annexes,” it adds.

CONTEXT

Greenland has been controlled by Denmark for centuries, previously as a colony and now as a semi-sovereign territory under the Danish realm. It is subject to the Danish constitution, meaning any change to its legal status would require a constitutional amendment.

Prime Minister Mute Egede, who has stepped up a push for independence, has repeatedly said the island is not for sale and that it is up to its people to decide their future.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Top Republicans in the U.S. Congress are considering imposing conditions on disaster aid to Los Angeles communities devastated by wildfires, after President-elect Donald Trump claimed that state and local officials had mishandled the situation. 

House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Monday that leading officials in the Democratic-led state mismanaged water resources and forests in the Los Angeles area before six simultaneous blazes tore across the second-largest U.S. city, claiming the lives of at least 24 people.    

“It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects. So that’s something that has to be factored in,” Johnson told reporters in the U.S. Capitol. 

“There should probably be conditions on that aid. That’s my personal view. We’ll see what the consensus is,” he said.

House Republicans have not yet discussed disaster aid to sections of California stricken by fire, Johnson said. The lawmakers were due to meet behind closed doors early on Tuesday.

With Trump due to take office in less than a week, Republican control of both the House and Senate gives the party full control over spending, including the form and volume of disaster relief.  

The president-elect took aim at the largely Democratic leaders of California and Los Angeles as “incompetent pols” over the weekend in a social media post about the wildfires that claimed “they have no idea out to put them out.”  

No. 2 Senate Republican John Barrasso on Sunday told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he expected to see “strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time.”

Johnson said House Republicans are also discussing the possibility of tying California aid to efforts to raise the limit on more than $36 trillion in U.S. debt. 

One hurdle facing disaster aid in Congress is an energized hardline conservative bloc that seeks offsets for any new spending.

Last month, the Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-led Senate approved more than $100 billion in new emergency funding to help states including North Carolina and Florida recover from devastating hurricanes.

Though many of the aid recipients live in Republican areas, some party members in both chambers pressed unsuccessfully to limit the aid as little as $40 billion.

While California is heavily Democratic, with the party holding both the governorship and two U.S. Senate seats, it was the site of several closely contested U.S. House, where Democrats succeeded in holding onto closely-fought seats. The state could play a critical role in determining House control once more in the 2026 midterm elections.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Scott Malone and Nick Zieminski)

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OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who has at times pushed back against his own party’s governor and other politicians who sought to push religion into public schools, announced Monday his candidacy for governor.

Drummond’s announcement at the Osage County Fairgrounds in Pawhuska, near his family’s sprawling ranch, kicked off an early start to the 2026 campaign season in one of the nation’s reddest states.

“I’m not running for governor so I can bow down to party bosses,” said Drummond, 61, a rancher and banker from one of Oklahoma’s most prominent landowning families.

A U.S. Air Force veteran who flew dozens of combat missions as a fighter pilot during the Gulf War in 1991, Drummond touted both his military roots and his work during his first term as attorney general shutting down illegal marijuana grow operations that flourished after Oklahoma voters legalized medical marijuana in 2018.

Drummond also enjoyed an early endorsement from the Oklahoma State Fraternal Order of Police, a 6,000-member organization whose executive board voted unanimously to back him, said FOP President Mark Nelson.

Drummond is the first official candidate in what is expected to be a crowded field of Republicans seeking to replace Gov. Kevin Stitt, who cannot run again because of term limits. Other possible candidates include former state Sen. Mike Mazzei, a former top budget advisor to Stitt; State Superintendent Ryan Walters, an ex-teacher and Stitt’s former education secretary; former House Speaker Charles McCall, an Atoka banker; Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell, the former national state party director for the Republican National Committee; and Chip Keating, Stitt’s former secretary of public safety and the son of former Gov. Frank Keating.

“I would say that Drummond starts with the highest name ID of anyone we’ve discussed, and he has very few negatives, but it’s way too early to handicap the field overall,” said Pat McFerron, a longtime Republican pollster in Oklahoma.

Drummond, who defeated Stitt’s hand-picked Attorney General John O’Connor in 2022, has occasionally clashed with Stitt on a number of topics, including the governor’s support of what would be the first publicly funded religious charter school in the U.S. Drummond argued before the state Supreme Court that the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board violated both Oklahoma law and the state and federal constitutions when it voted 3-2 in 2023 to approve the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City’s application to establish the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School.

Drummond also has been critical of Stitt’s confrontational approach to relations with many of the Native American tribes in Oklahoma and has indicated he supports more of a partnership with the sovereign nations.

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By Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. special counsel who prosecuted Democratic President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden called the president’s criticisms of the cases “gratuitous and wrong” in a final report on his probe published on Monday.

Special Counsel David Weiss brought cases against Hunter Biden for lying about his drug use when he purchased a gun in 2018 and for evading paying $1.4 million in taxes.

Joe Biden pardoned his son in December for those offenses and other conduct over an 11-year period after previously pledging he would not. In issuing the pardon, Biden said the cases had been improperly influenced by “raw politics.”

“This statement is gratuitous and wrong,” Weiss wrote in his final report. 

The criticism “undermines the very foundation of what makes America’s justice system fair and equitable,” Weiss wrote. “It erodes public confidence in an institution that is essential to preserving the rule of law.”

Justice Department regulations require special counsels, who are appointed to give sensitive investigations a degree of independence from department leadership, to submit a final report at the end of their probe.

Weiss, who has wrapped up his probe, used the report to issue a pointed defense of the Hunter Biden cases and hit back at Joe Biden’s criticisms.

Hunter Biden was found guilty in June after a trial in Delaware federal court on the gun charges and later pleaded guilty to tax charges in Los Angeles. 

Weiss secured indictments in both cases after a plea deal that would have likely allowed Hunter Biden to avoid prison time unraveled in 2023 under a questioning from a federal judge.

Hunter Biden, who has spoken publicly as his struggles with drug addiction, faced years of scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, particularly over his foreign business dealings.

Hunter Biden and his legal team have repeatedly alleged that political pressure pushed Weiss to abandon plea negotiations and instead pursue indictments that carried far greater legal jeopardy.

They argued that the tax and gun cases were ones that federal prosecutors ordinarily would not have pursued.

Weiss investigated Hunter Biden for years, first as U.S. attorney in Delaware appointed by President-elect Donald Trump in his first term and later as special counsel during Joe Biden’s administration. 

“I prosecuted the two cases against Mr. Biden because he broke the law,” Weiss wrote in the report.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Himani Sarkar)

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PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs knows she is outnumbered this legislative session, with Republicans having expanded their majorities in the statehouse after the last election.

But the first-term governor sees room for bipartisan compromise as she looks to advance policies that have long been stymied under the GOP-controlled Legislature.

While President-elect Donald Trump swept the battleground state, Hobbs noted in a recent interview with The Associated Press that Arizona voters also elected Democrat Ruben Gallego to the U.S. Senate, sending the message that they want their political leaders to work across the aisle to solve the thorniest of issues.

“The issues we’re facing — affordability for families, water security, protecting our border and keeping communities safe — those are not Republican or Democratic issues,” she said. “They’re just Arizona issues that our elected leaders, myself included, need to work together to solve.”

Hobbs, who will be up for reelection next year, is expected to outline her priorities when she addresses lawmakers at the start of the session Monday.

Here’s a look at key policy areas:

It was just two weeks after the November election when Hobbs visited the Arizona-Mexico border and vowed to work with Trump’s administration on issues like stopping fentanyl trafficking. But she also acknowledged some families are worried about the president-elect’s deportation threats.

While not wanting to speculate, Hobbs says Arizona will focus its limited law enforcement resources on keeping violent criminals off the streets, regardless of their immigration status.

Arizona voters last year approved a measure empowering local police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the border, so it’s unclear what new restrictions on immigration Republicans might push beyond ensuring adequate funding for law enforcement.

Hobbs will look to pressure lawmakers again to plug regulatory holes to protect groundwater sources. Her calls last year to update the state’s water laws failed to win legislative approval, leaving her administration to take executive action in December to curb unchecked pumping in one rural area.

This time around, Hobbs is optimistic she can reach a deal with lawmakers on revamping groundwater regulations. In the absence of a pact, Hobbs says she won’t hesitate to act unilaterally.

The stakes are high as Arizona has grappled with long-term drought and needs to come up with a plan by the end of 2026 to manage its dwindling share of water from the over-tapped Colorado River.

Reining in Arizona’s school voucher program remains on Hobbs’ wish list.

The program, which started in 2011 for disabled children and expanded to all students in 2022, lets parents subsidize private-school tuition and other educational costs with public money.

Hobbs and fellow Democrats have criticized the program, saying it contributes to a drain on the state’s coffers. Republican lawmakers have championed the program as a cornerstone of the school choice movement. The budget approved by lawmakers last year after weeks of negotiations with Hobbs’ office included only a small cut in spending for the program.

Unlike last year, the state isn’t facing a budget crunch. The latest revenue projection for the next fiscal year is up $231 million compared to the forecast last summer, according to legislative analysts.

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Gabriel Sandoval is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.

At least some of these nonpolitical employees have begun packing up their belongings since being asked about their loyalty to Trump — after they had earlier been given indications that they would be asked to stay on at the NSC in the new administration, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, in recent days publicly signaled his intention to get rid of all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC by Inauguration Day to ensure the council is staffed with those who support Trump’s agenda.

A wholesale removal of foreign policy and national security experts from the NSC on Day 1 of the new administration could deprive Trump’s team of considerable expertise and institutional knowledge at a time when the U.S. is grappling with difficult policy challenges in Ukraine, the Mideast and beyond. Such questioning could also make new policy experts brought in to the NSC less likely to speak up about policy differences and concerns.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan is making a robust case for the incoming Trump administration to hold over career government employees assigned to the NSC at least through the early going of the new administration.

“Given everything going on in the world, making sure you have in place a team that is up to speed, and, you know, ready to continue serving at 12:01, 12:02, 12:03 p.m. on the 20th is really important,” Sullivan said on Friday.

The NSC staff members being questioned about their loyalty are largely subject matter experts who have been loaned to the White House by federal agencies — the State Department, FBI and CIA, for example — for temporary duty that typically lasts one to two years. If removed from the NSC, they would be returned to their home agencies.

Vetting of the civil servants began in the last week, the official said. Some of them have been questioned about their politics by Trump appointees who will serve as directors on the NSC and who had weeks earlier asked them to stick around. There are dozens of civil servants at the directorate level at the NSC who had anticipated remaining at the White House in the new administration.

A second U.S. official told the AP that he was informed weeks ago by incoming Trump administration officials that they planned on raising questions with career appointees that work at the White House, including those at the NSC, about their political leanings. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly, however, had not yet been formally vetted.

Waltz told Breitbart News last week that “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20.” He added that he wanted the NSC to be staffed by personnel who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

“We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now,” Waltz said. “Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

A Trump transition official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said the incoming administration felt it was “entirely appropriate” to seek officials who share the incoming president’s vision and would be focused on common goals.

The NSC was launched as an arm of the White House during the Truman administration, tasked with advising and assisting the president on national security and foreign policy and coordinating among various government agencies. It is common for experts detailed to the NSC to carry over from one administration to the next, even when the White House changes parties.

Sullivan said he had not spoken to Waltz about the staffing matter, and said it was “up to the next national security adviser to decide how they want to play things. All I can say is how we did it and what I thought worked.”

“When they are selected to come over, they’re not selected based on their political affiliation or their policy opinions, they’re selected based on their experience and capacity and so we have a real diversity of people in terms of their views, their politics, their backgrounds,” Sullivan said of those assigned to the NSC. “The common element of all of it is we get the best of the best here” from agencies including the State Department, the intelligence community, the Pentagon and the Homeland Security and Treasury departments.

Sullivan noted when Biden took office in 2021, he inherited most of his NSC staff from the outgoing Trump administration.

“Those folks were awesome,” Sullivan said. “They were really good.”

Trump, during his first term, was scarred when two career military officers detailed to the NSC became whistleblowers, raising their concerns about Trump’s 2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which the president sought an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter. That episode led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Alexander Vindman was listening to the call in his role as an NSC official when he became alarmed at what he heard. He approached his twin brother, Eugene, who at the time was serving as an ethics lawyer at the NSC. Both Vindmans reported their concerns to superiors.

Alexander Vindman said in a statement Friday that the Trump team’s approach to staffing the NSC “will have a chilling effect on senior policy staff across the government.”

He added, “Talented professionals, wary of being dismissed for principled stances or offering objective advice, will either self-censor or forgo service altogether.”

The two men were heralded by Democrats as patriots for speaking out and derided by Trump as insubordinate. Eugene Vindman in November was elected as a Democrat to represent Virginia’s 7th Congressional District.

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By Tim Reid

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On the morning after Donald Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, acting National Park Service director Mike Reynolds was at home preparing breakfast when he received a call from the new president.

Trump, a Republican, was unhappy with photographs published by media outlets suggesting his inauguration crowd in Washington’s National Mall was smaller than the one that had gathered for former Democratic President Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony in 2009, according to two people familiar with details of the call.

Trump ordered Reynolds and the Park Service – which oversees the National Mall – to provide new images from its own photos taken that day to correct the perception that Trump’s inaugural crowd was smaller than Obama’s. The NPS later forwarded new photos to the White House. 

With President-elect Trump’s second inauguration a week away and his fixation with attendance numbers at his public events undiminished, crowd size is going to be front and center again for Trump, media outlets and crowd-size experts monitoring the ceremony.

One person familiar with thinking inside the Park Service said there are concerns that the agency might again be caught in the middle of an inauguration crowd-size controversy, should its images of the number of attendees on the National Mall on Jan. 20 appear unflattering to Trump.

Rachel Reisner, the Trump inaugural committee’s communications director, did not address questions about how many people they expected in the National Mall next week.

“The team is putting the finishing touches together for what will be an unforgettable string of events. The Inaugural events will draw supporters, industry leaders, and diplomats of all backgrounds to Washington DC,” Reisner said in a statement.

The NPS stopped giving crowd-size estimates for events on the Mall in 1996, after facing a lawsuit over its estimate for the Million Man March, a 1995 political protest.

The Park Service will be taking photographs of next Monday’s event, although not for crowd size estimates.

Media outlets including Reuters have also received permission to take photos from the top of the 555-foot-high (169 meters) Washington Monument, in the center of the Mall, which will give an overview of the entire inaugural crowd.

A Reuters photo from atop the Washington Monument at Trump’s first inauguration was one of the key images that appeared to show fewer people in attendance that day than at Obama’s first inauguration.

Crowd-size experts estimate the number of people on the National Mall for Obama’s first inauguration was between 800,000 and 1 million. Trump drew about a third of that total in 2017, they say. Democratic President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration was a much smaller event as it took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crowd size was an ongoing preoccupation for Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. He repeatedly said his crowds were larger than those of his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

People who attend inaugurations come from all over the country, often in buses organized by political groups that support the incoming president.

‘LARGEST AUDIENCE TO WITNESS AN INAUGURATION – PERIOD’

G. Keith Still, a renowned crowd scientist and visiting professor at the University of Suffolk in England, analyzed Trump’s 2017 inaugural crowd in real time, and will be doing so again during next week’s ceremony. Still concluded that Trump’s 2017 crowd was about one-third the size of Obama’s 2009 audience.

Still told Reuters he uses aerial photos to calculate the number of people in attendance, with the help of Google Earth. By calculating the area a crowd is occupying, and the number of people that occupy a square yard, Still says a relatively reliable crowd-size estimate can be made.

He augments his finding by using the number of riders on Washington’s metro train system, the size of queues at entry points to the National Mall, the rates at which spaces on the Mall are occupied and car-park occupancy.

“The numbers don’t lie,” Still said.

The crowd-size controversy consumed the first days of Trump’s first term in office.

Trump’s then-White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, in a press conference the day after Trump was sworn in, told reporters, “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe.”

Spicer cited figures – that he has since acknowledged were inaccurate but which he believed at the time – that put the number of people in the National Mall at 720,000. Trump, speaking at CIA headquarters the day after his inauguration, said the crowd looked like “a million and a half people.”

The NPS issues permits to an incoming president’s inaugural committee that allow  crowds to gather on the National Mall to watch the swearing-in ceremony.

The permit application drafted by the NPS on behalf of Trump’s inaugural committee for next week’s ceremony currently contains a placeholder estimate of 500,000 people to be on the National Mall, according to a copy seen by Reuters.

In Trump’s 2017 National Mall permit, the same placeholder figure was sent to his inaugural committee. The final permitted figure was 750,000 to 1 million people, according to the NPS permit.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Washington, Editing by Ross Colvin and Matthew Lewis)

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By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

PRINCETON, New Jersey (Reuters) – Laura Petrillo still remembers a 2002 day on the Princeton campus when she got into a heated argument with Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon.

She was putting up posters by Princeton’s Organization of Women Leaders, a feminist group known better by its acronym OWL. Hegseth and his friends from the campus’ conservative paper, The Princeton Tory, were tearing her posters down and putting up their own, leading to a verbal altercation, she says.

Such clashes between idealistic college students aren’t unusual. 

But for Hegseth, the publisher of The Tory and the school’s best-known conservative at the time, the episode was one of several examples examined by Reuters of his confrontation with modern feminism on campus, decades before he would argue against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the U.S. military. Reuters spoke to more than a dozen former students, faculty and staff at the university to build a picture of his time at Princeton from 1999 to 2003.

Hegseth’s spokesperson did not respond to questions about this incident and others described in this story. Asked about Hegseth’s time at Princeton, a university spokesperson said they had no comment.

Hegseth’s views toward diversity in the U.S. military, including the role of women, are likely to be a focus of his confirmation hearing on Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

While his recent past has been scrutinized in the media, his college years have received less attention.  

Under Hegseth’s watch, The Tory published a cover story in 2002 that put a cartoon owl in a gunsight — and then on page three, appeared to show the same owl with three bullet-holes in its head, drops of blood spilling to the ground.

“That felt threatening,” said Petrillo, OWL’s publicity chair at the time.

The Tory article’s headline was: “Killing Feminism: OWL sabotages the women’s movement.” 

As publisher, Hegseth ran other articles that called homosexuality “abnormal and immoral” and argued that sexual intercourse with an unconscious woman would not be “a clear case of rape” because there would be no duress. He wrote a piece that attacked what he saw as Princeton’s “gratuitous glorification of diversity.” 

Brittany Hume Charm recalled an event where she said OWL tried and failed to bury the hatchet with Hegseth, who showed up in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) uniform and appeared dismissive of OWL’s concerns. She recalled that his unusual decision to appear in uniform seemed meant to intimidate.

Reuters spoke to two former classmates who described Hegseth as friendly and as someone willing to poke fun at himself. They pointed to a paintball duel held on campus between Hegseth and the head of the college Democrats as an example of how he didn’t take himself too seriously. 

Judson Wallace, a friend who was on the Princeton basketball team with him, said Hegseth was hardworking, caring and “the best player that never played,” since he was not a starter on the team.

Tessa Muir, a former Army captain, who served under Hegseth in the ROTC program, had a positive view of Hegseth during his time at Princeton, calling him “kind.” But she said she has also been alarmed by his recent comments opposing women in combat, a position he has softened as he courts Senate votes for confirmation.

“I felt so duped that he was put in charge of co-ed cadets,” Muir recalled thinking when she learned about Hegseth’s views.

Muir became an attorney in the Army and served in posts including South Korea.

RAPE SCENARIO

In an interview with Reuters, Thema Bryant, who led the Princeton office that seeks to combat and respond to sexual assault from 2001 to 2004, took issue with a 2002 edition of Hegseth’s Tory that criticized a freshman orientation course about sexual assault.

The course included a scenario about a student who drank herself unconscious and then was raped. A Tory article said that did not constitute a clear case of rape because she did not suffer duress since she was unconscious. 

While she doesn’t recall seeing the article at the time, Bryant said Hegseth should apologize for its insensitivity towards survivors. 

“And if you’re talking about (the department of) defense, we would have to wonder who are you going to defend? Who are you going to protect? And can you be trusted to do that?” she asked.

Sexual assault is a persistent problem in the military.

Asked about sexual assault on campus during Hegseth’s time at Princeton, a university spokesperson referred Reuters to Department of Education data that showed 28 forced sex offenses on Princeton’s campus between 2001 and 2003.

Hegseth arrived at Princeton already with affection for the military and with conservative leaning views and values, his father, Brian Hegseth, told Reuters.

“Instead of just going along with the tide, he thought it through and believed that what he had already was worth preserving,” he said. 

His role as a conservative leader on campus sometimes made him the butt of jokes. 

An old joke about Hegseth started circulating again among Princeton alumni after Trump nominated him to lead the Pentagon in November. Appearing in a campus humor magazine when he was a senior, it quoted one “Indian girl” overheard talking to another about how Hegseth seemed like a nice guy.

“Yeah, but you know he really wants to send you and your family back to India, right?” the second student responded in the Nassau Weekly magazine’s Dec. 2002 edition.

After graduating from Princeton in 2003, Hegseth served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has two Bronze Stars. He received a Master’s from Harvard University in 2013.

But Hegseth has faced what he says is a smear campaign by the media as reports surface about his past, including a 2021 incident first reported by Reuters where he was branded an “insider threat” by a fellow member of the Army National Guard over his tattoos. Hegseth has said the incident led him to be pulled from Guard duty in Washington during President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

He has denied any wrongdoing over a 2017 sexual assault allegation which did not result in charges, as well as accusations against him of excessive drinking and financial mismanagement at veterans’ organizations. Hegseth’s mother has aided his defense, retracting an email that surfaced of her criticizing his treatment of women during one of his two divorces.

Much like in his Princeton days, Hegseth sees himself as the underdog, this time in his effort to become defense secretary. He compared it to his time on the Princeton basketball team, where he was often benched and “told I wasn’t good enough to play.” 

“I’m used to people coming at me,” he told Sirius XM radio. 

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Claudia Parsons)

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(Reuters) -Scott Bessent, the investor selected by President-elect Donald Trump to be his Treasury secretary, will divest from his Key Square Group hedge fund and other investments, according to a letter to the Treasury Department’s ethics office.

Bessent outlined the steps he would take to “avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest in the event that I am confirmed for the position of Secretary of the Department of Treasury,” according to the letter.

The money manager, tapped by Trump on Nov. 23 to be the top U.S. economic policymaker, said he would resign from his position in Bessent-Freeman Family Foundation.

He also plans to shutter Key Square Capital Management, the investment firm he founded, according to the New York Times, which first reported Bessent’s divestments.

Reuters reported in November that if Bessent were to take a job in the new administration, Key Square could be wound down, sold, or put in “sleep mode.”

A spokesperson for Bessent declined to comment.

On Friday, Trump repeated the financial arrangement that he made during his first term, handing over daily management of his multi-billion-dollar real estate, hotel, golf, media and licensing portfolio to his children when he enters the White House.

(Reporting by Chandni Shah and Urvi Dugar; Editing by David Gregorio and William Mallard)

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