“Daily Show” correspondent Desi Lydic on Tuesday reminded viewers of disturbing comments Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made years before he became embroiled in a scandal over a pair of deadly military strikes on an alleged drug trafficking boat.
Hegseth has been accused of overseeing an act of “murder” or “war crime” in a Sept. 2 attack on survivors who clung to the boat’s wreckage. Lydic said she wished for a sign that he would have been “so cavalier” about war crimes.
That’s when she tossed to a 2019 clip of the former Fox News host defending Mathew L. Golsteyn, an Army major charged with killing an Afghan detainee who was alleged to be a Taliban bomb maker, and pardoned by President Donald Trump before the investigation was completed.
“If he committed premeditated murder, then Duncan did as well. Then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?” Hegseth asked during a “Fox & Friends” interview with then-Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), an Iraq War veteran. “Put us all in jail!”
Lydic shrugged her shoulders as the “Daily Show” crowd applauded.
