Jimmy Kimmel said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s pals at his former workplace, Fox News, are trying their best to defend him amid the Signal group messaging scandal.
But they’re not exactly doing a very good job of it.
“You know how sometimes your friends defend you and you wish they wouldn’t?” Kimmel said.
Kimmel rolled footage of the hosts of “Fox & Friends” talking about the scandal, in which national security adviser Michael Waltz reportedly added a journalist by accident to a highly sensitive group chat discussion in which Hegseth revealed details of a planned military action in Yemen.
Kimmel said the nature of the flub has led to a “vicious rumor” that Hegseth was drinking on the job given his alleged previous issues with alcohol, which he has denied.
The “Fox & Friends” team said Hegseth told them he doesn’t drink at all anymore and it wasn’t an issue anyway.
“He never had a drinking problem,” Brian Kilmeade insisted in the footage Kimmel played. Kilmeade also analyzed Hegseth’s messages in the Signal app: “There were no misspellings in that exchange. There was nothing that was bizarre. It was extremely official.”
Kimmel chuckled at the odd defense, then mockingly summarized it.
“In the old days, when Pete would get hammered in texts, he had everything spelled wrong, his thoughts were bizarre. This had none of that,” Kimmel said. “There wasn’t even a dick pic!”
Then Kimmel offered a defense of his own.
“I believe that Pete Hegseth wasn’t drunk,” Kimmel said. “I believe he was perfectly sober when he made this idiotic mistake.”
He said President Donald Trump might not be very happy with his national security and defense picks.
“Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz have said and done so many stupid things this week, Trump might have to start calling them Eric and Don Jr.,” Kimmel said.
See more in his Thursday night monologue: