A female former colleague of Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth at a veterans’ organization he led slammed Democrats for repeating lies peddled in the mainstream media and for their hypocrisy on supporting women.
Holly K. Talley, who worked for Pete Hegseth as the Louisiana director at Concerned Veterans for America from 2013 to 2015, said she has publicly refuted an anonymously-sourced lie that Hegseth took staffers to a strip club while in her state, but Democrats have ignored her and keep repeating the lie.
In an interview with Breitbart News on Wednesday, Talley said Hegseth was not even in the state at the time of the alleged incident, and she has said this multiple times on the record, but reporters and Democrats have ignored her.
“Pete was not even in the state. He was nowhere near Louisiana. It wasn’t like we were in Shreveport and he was in Baton Rouge or something like that, or we were in New Orleans and he was in Leesville. He was not in the state and he was nowhere near the state,” she said.
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She said after the lie first surfaced in the New Yorker, she was contacted by Washington Post reporter Michael Krainish and specifically asked about it. She said despite her refuting the lie, he did not include that in his story (which cited the New Yorker).
The Post only cited Talley as saying Hegseth “was a respectful person. I never saw him cross any boundaries personally. … He was a great leader.”
And lie has continued to be repeated, including by Democrats during Hegseth’s high-profile confirmation hearing on Tuesday desperate to embarrass him.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) falsely stated at the hearing: “Another colleague, not anonymous, we have this, said you took co-workers to a strip club, you were drunk, you tried to dance with strippers, you had to be held off the stage.”
“One of your employees in that event filed a sexual harassment charge as a result of it,” Kaine stated “Isn’t that the kind of behavior, if true, would be disqualifying to be secretary of Defense?”
Hegseth responded, “Anonymous false charges.”
And Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) later asked Hegseth, “In 2014, while in Louisiana on official business for CVA, did you take your staff, including young female staff members, to a strip club?
“Absolutely not. Anonymous smears,” he said.
Kelly falsely stated, “So is it accurate that the organization reached a financial settlement with a female staffer who claimed to be at a strip club with you and there was a colleague who attempted to sexually assault her? Was there a financial settlement?”
Hegseth responded, “Senator, I was not involved in that. I don’t know the nature of how that played out.”
Meanwhile, nearly all female Democrat senators at the hearing railed against Hegseth’s view that standards should not be lowered for women who want to serve in ground combat, and accused him of disrespecting women.
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Talley called those accusations — while repeatedly ignoring her and other female colleagues of Hegseth — hypocritical.
“It makes it makes you feel unseen and unheard, that your experience and your circumstance doesn’t matter. Is it ironic,” she said.
The lie is continuing to be repeated, she said, most recently in a local Lousiana news outlet article.
Talley said to see the lies repeated is frustrating, since as a then-young female employee at CVA, Hegseth treated her with nothing but respect.
“Pete never made me feel unheard or unseen. He always listened genuinely and valued my opinion and insight,” she said. “And if I felt in any way that Pete was not the leader or the boss or the friend, or however you want to put it, when I was at CVA, I would not have come out on record to say, this isn’t what I knew. This isn’t my experience.”
She said she was proud of the way her former boss handled the contentious hearing despite the lies being flung at him.
“In the face of those attacks, I think he remained level headed, cool, calm and collected, as cliche as that sounds,” she said.
“You want someone who’s going to answer with the facts, remain calm, and go forward and not get caught up in the emotion of it, [and] I think a lot of the senators were caught up in the emotion,” she added.
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