House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Sunday said he is a “hard yes” on supporting an impeachment resolution targeting Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth.
“I’m a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution. The so-called secretary of defense has abused his power, undermined our national security and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran,” Jeffries said in an interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday.
Regarding whether other Democratic members of the House would support a Hegseth impeachment, Jeffries told ABC on Sunday, “We’ll certainly have that conversation on Tuesday morning when we reconvene for the first time in Washington, D.C. But I believe there will be incredibly strong support for that resolution.”
He was referring a resolution that would be introduced in the House by outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to impeach the secretary.
Massie last week told CNN that he would be planning to call for a vote to impeach the Pentagon head. On X, he wrote that “there is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment: Hegseth resigns.”
A day later, he wrote: “My Hegseth impeachment resolution is a much gentler version of what’s coming when Dem’s control Congress. They’ll have hearings & trials.”
Jeffries is likely to become the next House speaker after Democrats made significant gains in the lower congressional chamber as well as the Senate, gaining control of Congress.
To impeach Hegseth, it would require a simple majority vote. However, convicting an official has a much higher threshold the Senate, requiring a two-thirds majority vote.
In the two impeachment efforts against President Donald Trump during his first presidential term, the House voted to impeach him twice but Trump was not convicted either time in the Senate.
On Thursday, Hegseth shot back against the talk of impeaching him in a post on X.
Apparently referring to Massie, he said that “a disgruntled, defeated congressman, along with all his Democrat allies, has also dropped sham articles of impeachment against yours truly.”
“Just like they tried against President [Donald] Trump twice. You see, their policies don’t work, so their obsession with political theater disguised as power drives them to try to destroy their opponents. It’s all about the politics of personal destruction. Didn’t work against President Trump, and it won’t work with me. You can rest assured of that,” Hegseth said.
Last week, Trump told reporters that he has no plans to replace Hegseth, while he also acknowledged the Iran war played a role in Republicans’ significant losses in the midterms.
When asked whether he was considering a replacement, Trump said that “no, I think he’s doing a very good job.”
Trump also indicated on social media that impeachment requests already made by Democrats are “extortion at the highest level, and they should be held accountable.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche echoed the president. “They are not allowed to just go around threatening existing members of the administration, to go around threatening companies, and that’s what President Trump is extremely worried about, and he should be,” Blanche said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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