Former colleagues of Pete Hegseth are denying sweeping allegations of financial mismanagement and sexual impropriety against the current defense secretary-designee during his time leading a veterans advocacy group — which included a booze-fueled trip to a strip club with co-workers.
Sean Parnell, an ex-senior adviser to Hegseth at Concerned Veterans for America, told The Post in a phone interview on Tuesday that lurid details shared anonymously in a New Yorker article were utterly false and “not reflective” of the Army vet he came to know as the organization’s president.
“If you read that article, I mean, I think you come away thinking that CVA was some sort of slush fund for parties or something — and nothing could be further from the truth,” said Parnell, who worked under Hegseth from 2013 to 2016.
“There were no strip clubs involved that I can recall,” he added. “Sometimes the staff — after the events were over — we would go out and have a drink. But it was never some crazy, insane thing like that article.”
According two former employees as well as portions of emails and a 2015 whistleblower dossier produced in the New Yorker piece, Hegseth was asked to step down from heading up CVA and Veterans for Freedom, another advocacy group, because he got “totally sloshed” at events and looked the other way when male members of his senior management sexually harassed female associates.
The Fox News personality once purportedly got so inebriated at a topless place while on a CVA junket in Louisiana in November 2014 that he “tried to get on the stage and dance with the strippers” — and a female colleague “had to get him off” before security guards kicked them out.
At another point, the report claimed that Hegseth was blotto on a CVA tour of Ohio in May 2015 — and began shouting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” with an unnamed person traveling in the group’s cohort.
The future Pentagon pick also generally “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account — for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road,” according to an email llegedly sent to Hegseth’s successor, Jae Pak, in January 2016.
Parnell, who was himself on the trip 10 years ago to the Pelican State, said none of those allegations were true, describing CVA’s functions as typically “super positive” and “patriotic events.”
The descriptions in the New Yorker article, he added, were not “reflective of the organization that I was a part of, nor is it reflective of the type of person and leader [Hegseth] really was.”
The ex-CVA senior adviser also said he had not heard about the whistleblower report — despite it being compiled and sent to top members of management during his years at the organization.
According to Parnell, neither Hegseth nor himself misused funds but, rather, the pair had a disagreement with other higher-ups at CVA over foreign policy positions as they slowly embraced Trump’s isolationist leanings — creating a rift with the group’s more hawkish donor base.
But Parnell, who himself was awarded two Bronze Stars and served as an Army Ranger combat infantryman during the Afghanistan war, added that Hegseth was never forced out.
“The people that funded CVA back then … they weren’t necessarily on board with Trump’s vision of foreign policy,” he said. “But that was that was fairly well known and because of those policy differences, Pete left.”
A second former colleague who served with Hegseth at CVA told Compact Magazine, which was first to report on the vigorous denials from Parnell, that the bawdy behavior presented in the report didn’t pass the smell test — and came from co-workers who had been sacked.
“All false,” said the veteran who also served under Hegseth in a senior role. “These were false allegations made by a group of disgruntled employees fired by Pete.”
The vet even suggested that the whistleblowers were attributing their own misdeeds to his former boss, who was awarded a Bronze Star for his combat deployment during the Iraq war.
“He left because his role on Fox was growing and he had a book deal,” the second vet told Compact. “‘Pete didn’t have another job lined up,’ the piece says, but very shortly after he left, he became a full-time ‘Fox & Friends’ host.”
Parnell, who wrote the New York Times bestseller “Outlaw Platoon” about his combat deployment, also speculated that the source of the allegations could stem from Washington.
Some at the Pentagon will likely be unhappy with Trump’s selection of Hegseth, he indicated, because the soon-to-be 47th president could upend the entrenched bureaucracy and cut off funding — hence the backlash.
“President Trump was elected to be a disruptor,” Parnell pointed out. “And I think some of [his] cabinet picks reflect what [he] expects those reforms to be.”
