The House on Tuesday narrowly staved off an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, temporarily easing the political pressure facing President Donald Trump and his polarizing Pentagon chief.
By a 211-204 vote, lawmakers referred the impeachment articles to a committee for further study, effectively sidelining the measures. Had the effort advanced, lawmakers would have held final votes Wednesday.
The result follows a coordinated effort within the Trump administration — including by Trump himself — to defend Hegseth. The secretary held a rare Pentagon news conference Tuesday during which he attacked the impeachment push and appealed directly to the president and his allies in Congress.
Rep. Thomas Massie (Kentucky), a fellow Republican and frequent critic of Trump, led the impeachment effort, which focused on the Iran war and Hegseth’s controversial leadership of the Pentagon.
The vote displayed GOP unity following the party’s midterm losses last week. Enough Republicans showed up to defend Hegseth, and only Massie supported the effort.
In a social media post after the vote, Trump attacked Massie and celebrated the result as an “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot,” referring to Hegseth.
Massie told reporters after the vote: “We put the question to Congress. What I found out tonight is they still haven’t broken from the spell of Donald Trump. He still controls this conference.”
While Hegseth survived Tuesday’s vote, he emerged facing more outspoken GOP criticism of his tenure than ever before during his two years as defense secretary. Multiple Republicans who opposed the impeachment still said they were unhappy with Hegseth, and some GOP senators indicated they would have been open to holding a trial had the impeachment advanced.
Democrats, who beginning in January will hold sizable majorities in both chambers of Congress, have said they will seek to use their newfound power to remove Hegseth from office.
Whether Hegseth remains defense secretary has become a central question since voters handed the Republican Party resounding defeats last week, chiefly over their disapproval of the Iran war.
During his Pentagon news briefing earlier Tuesday, he sought to reframe the allegations leveled against him, saying they were “not about me” but rather an attack on the president and the rank-and-file military personnel who have carried out the administration’s orders. Hegseth characterized the impeachment attempt as an act of “sabotage” in what amounted to a strident, highly partisan defense of his tenure in office.
Hegseth, however, declined to address some of the foremost unanswered questions about the Iran war, including whether the United States was responsible for a strike on a girls school that killed scores of people, mostly children. Instead, he argued that concerns about civilian casualties resulting from American military action amount to “slander against every professional who flew, sailed and fought on these missions.”
Tuesday’s news conference was Hegseth’s first at the Pentagon since May despite the ongoing military operation in the Middle East, where more than 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed in support of the stalemated war. His critics on Capitol Hill also have expressed disapproval of the administration’s lack of transparency about the conflict, now in its ninth month.
He appeared alone at the lectern, speaking for about 30 minutes and taking questions only from a handful of conservative journalists after his security staff — in a highly unusual encounter with the assembled media — threatened to physically remove anyone acting unprofessionally.
Hegseth made clear in his remarks that he views the impeachment effort as part of a broader campaign against Trump, drawing a direct line to the two efforts to remove the president from office during his first term. Now, he said, Trump’s opponents are coming after him.
“If standing with President Trump puts me in that company, I’ll take that company every day of the week,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also sought to align himself with rank-and-file troops, saying that “politicians in Washington” have accused them of “war crimes” in the campaign of deadly airstrikes against alleged narcotics traffickers at sea. The legality of such attacks has been questioned by some lawmakers and law-of-war experts, and claims have emerged that some of those killed were not drug runners but fishermen.
“If they want to come for the warriors,” Hegseth said, “they’re going to have to come through me.”
Despite Hegseth’s and Trump’s declarations, maintaining White House support was not seen as guaranteed. Two former administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the president may be reluctant to spend much political capital defending Hegseth.
Hegseth has served as a top salesman for the Iran war, initiated alongside Israel in February. But those close to the administration have questioned whether the president instead might dismiss Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or Adm. Brad Cooper, who has overseen the war as the head of U.S. Central Command.
As The Washington Post reported previously, all three men, at times, have failed to ensure that Trump clearly understood the war’s risks or its impact on the U.S. military’s arsenal of critical and hard-to-replace interceptors.
Mariana Alfaro and Anna Liss-Roy contributed to this report.
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