Bill Kristol and Margaret Donovan: Hegseth Should Be Impeached

hi bill crystal here welcome to the bulwark podcast i i am not tim miller as you probably noticed and i'm happy to be pinch hitting however for tim miller as he finishes up his little break and he'll be back on monday you'll be glad to hear and i think uh the bulwark podcast will be dark tomorrow. So this is our last non-Tim Miller podcast. The pressure's on me and our terrific

guest, Margaret Donovan. I think Margaret can live up to this. I'm not sure I can handle the pressure, but Margaret teaches the Yale Law School and is in private practice there, was an army captain in the Army in the Judge Advocate General's Corps in the 2010s, It was a JAG in Iraq and Syria in 2016-17, I think.

So it was right in the middle of the fighting there against ISIS and gave a lot of legal advice to people who were involved in that war. And not a lot, really, a ton, right? And day-to-day, every day, I think.

And so it has real familiarity with the Defense Department, where you served six years, but also with combat and its strains on the laws of how it interacts with wars and the laws of war.

And you teach about that and comment on that now, both in print and on other media. So thanks, Margaret, for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

No, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I've learned stuff from you over the last year and I will today. So I want to get to Iran, obviously,

because there's a lot of issues on Iran. You've spoken on several of them. And also the drug war before Iran raises all kinds of issues.

But I want to talk more broadly about the Defense Department. under Pete Hexeth in the second Trump term, because I've been a little,

well, I'm very much an outsider looking at it, but I've talked to people who were there and have been there and are close to people who are there.

And I'd say they're more alarmed than I think they expect it to be by the state of politicization, professionalism, honesty even,

in terms of communicating to the public at DOD. And I'd like to get your thoughts on that. Maybe use the begin though with this New York Times story

from just a couple of days ago of how Admiral Cardell became Chief of Naval Operations, which happened a year ago. But pretty stunning account of how he got himself that job. And remember, Hexeth had come in and fired, right, the CNO, as well as

the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and many other general officers. So you know how this works. You've been close to it and still are in touch with people. Give us a sense of what you thought reading that Time story. Maybe you knew a lot of that already, but what does it tell us? I mean, the time story on Admiral Cottle and the sort of evolution of how he got to the position he's in, I just think is really fascinating because it's like this little microcosm of, you know, a lot of different problems that people are seeing in the military right now.

You have these legal conflicts of interest. You have what appears to be not an entirely merits-based promotion. And then in the center of it all, you have a highly qualified officer who was ousted, Lisa Franchetti, who's a vice admiral in the Navy. And, you know, I think just like taking a step back, thinking about the context in which this particular chain of events happened, as the Times story outlined, basically, Admiral Franchetti was like, you know, knew there was a political wave coming. And basically, as the reporting states, kind of gathered some of her subordinate leadership and her key players and was like, look, everybody, focus on the mission. There's going to be this political wave rolling through and like, remember what's important.

It's the people and the mission and, you know, making sure that we stay eyes forward and staying focused. and supposedly, according to the story, Admiral Cottle was actually in that group, in that audience. And the sort of, I guess, really sort of clever way maybe that the Times wrote that made you

think that Cottle heard that and thought, wow, there's a political wave? Like, how can I ride that? And then sort of separately tried to coordinate with Hegseth's people as he was getting ready for his nomination hearing.

So the backdrop to all of this is that Secretary Hegseth has been firing people, summarily firing military officers, very senior, very experienced military officers or otherwise kind of forcing them into retirement in situations where they would normally advance into into leadership positions. and he's doing so not based on merit, not based on the entire body of their life's career and their life's work,

not based on their officer evaluation reports, something called an OER, which is basically an annual review that allows you to advance in the military,

not based on their combat records, not based on their command time, not based on the schools they've been to, the awards that they've earned,

but instead based on as near as anybody can tell this like internal judgment that he has that their politics don't align with his. And the irony of that from a guy who has really campaigned for this job by saying that the military is filled with woke promotions and people who don't deserve to be where they're

going to be and women don't meet standards and standards are lowered for women going to combat. And we've got to just make one standard for all. And that's how the military should be.

The irony of the guy who has been pushing that to then fire people not based on merit or not based on their careers, based on something entirely political is just kind of astounding. The other sort of like culturally offensive part of this, which I don't really even think you have to have served in the military to understand, that the people that are getting fired are true leaders, like completely respected, battle tested. They have, you know, dust on their boots, so to speak.

They have seen action. they have experienced far more in their military careers than Pete Hexth could ever have dreamed of in his. And there are, you know, some striking differences.