BREAKING: Trump Is About to Feed Pete Hegseth to the Wolves, and the Wolves Have Subpoenas.

Trump’s own aides say he’ll hang the midterm wipeout on Hegseth. Democrats have subpoena power and Massie’s eight articles are waiting.

Dean Blundell - Nov 4

Pete Hegseth has about three weeks to figure out which door he’s leaving through, and every one of them has a mob on the other side. Republicans got annihilated Tuesday night. Democrats took the Senate with at least 54 seats, flipped Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina, and CBS projects somewhere between 251 and 268 House seats, which is not a majority so much as a landslide with a gavel attached. By Wednesday morning, before the hangover had even set in, Trump was on the phone with advisers asking whether his Secretary of Defense should keep his job. Multiple sources told CBS News this. The White House then issued a statement saying the President has “full confidence” in Hegseth, which is the sentence every cabinet secretary hears about 72 hours before they’re cleaning out the office.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening, because the choreography is familiar. Trump started a war with Iran on February 28 without a vote from Congress. Gas prices went vertical. American service members came home in boxes. Thousands of Americans got stranded in the Middle East. Voters punished the party in charge, as they always do when you lie to them about a war. And now the man who launched it needs someone else to wear it, so he’s shopping for a face.

JD Vance went first, posting a long essay Wednesday morning declaring “the reason we lost is the war.”

Don “All The Cocaine” Jr. backed him up.

Trump told the Wall Street Journal the war “was a piece of” the loss, then told reporters it was “largely true” that Republicans lost because of Iran, then walked it back an hour later and said it was actually gas prices, as if gas prices were an act of God unrelated to bombing the Strait of Hormuz. When the President, the Vice President and the President’s son all say the war did it, and the President is simultaneously asking whether to fire the Secretary of War, you don’t need a decoder ring.

CBS reports some of Trump’s aides expect the blame to land on Hegseth, with CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine catching the overflow for “their roles in advising on the war.” The Atlantic reported earlier this week that Trump had already been stewing about Iran before the election, that he’d been looking for someone to blame for how the war went, and that his frustration was aimed at Caine and Hegseth specifically because Hegseth had been feeding him an overly rosy picture of the conflict. So the guy who told the President the war was going great is about to discover that the President remembers who told him that.

Pete Hegseth Is Begging Marsha Blackburn To Hide Him In The Senate To Help Him Outrun All The Murdering

Hegseth, meanwhile, has been planning his exit for a month, and the plan is embarrassing. Puck reported in late October that he’s been angling for Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat once she’s governor of Tennessee. Blackburn won Tuesday night, barely, with 45.5% of the vote in a three-way race, the first Tennessee governor elected with under 50% in at least a century. She’s said she’ll stay in the Senate until she’s sworn in this January so she can personally pick her replacement, and the appointee holds the seat through early 2031. Hegseth moved his family to Tennessee in 2022, went to a UT football game with Blackburn last month, and has been working the phones. The Pentagon’s press secretary called the whole thing “beltway gossip by anonymous sources,” which is what you say when the gossip is accurate, and the sources are your own staff.

He doesn't want that seat for public service. Sitting senators can’t be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate the way a cabinet officer can. A Senate seat is a bunker. The problem is that Tim Burchett wants the same seat and has spent months campaigning for Blackburn in all 95 counties; Tennessee GOP rules may not even consider Hegseth a “true Republican” eligible to run in the 2028 primary without a waiver, and Blackburn now has to decide whether to spend her first week as governor handing a lifeboat to the most radioactive man in Washington. If she says no, the reporting lines up: Hegseth walks in the coming weeks rather than get fired, and either way the investigations don’t stop because he changed his address.

Those investigations are already built. The Telegraph reported before the election that House Democrats had made contact with potential whistleblowers inside the Pentagon and planned to subpoena Hegseth’s inner circle the moment they had the majority. Current and former officials were described as ready to “spill their guts.” Signalgate, the second Signal chat with his wife and brother, the inspector general report that found he violated policy and put troops at risk, the Caribbean boat strikes, the second strike on survivors, all of it. Democrats in the Senate were already floating his ouster as leverage in defense spending talks. Now they don’t need leverage. They have the committees.

And then there’s Massie.

BREAKING: A Republican Just Filed War Crimes Charges Against Trump’s Secretary of War. On the Same Day the FBI Director Had to Explain the Bestiality Thing.

On September 15, Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican Trump primaried out of office, stood on the House floor for 67 minutes and read a 34-page resolution containing eight articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth. He filed it as privileged, which meant the House had to vote within two legislative days. Mike Johnson’s response was to shut the House down and send everyone home early rather than make Republicans go on the record about a girls’ school. The articles never got their vote. They are still on the table, and when the House comes back for the lame duck session, outgoing Speaker Johnson no longer controls whether they’re taken up. In January, Hakeem Jeffries does.

Here is what Massie put on paper, charge by charge.

Article I: Waging war in violation of the War Powers Resolution, Section 2(c). Hegseth executed the order to attack Iran on February 28, 2026, with no declaration of war, no statutory authorization, and no attack on the United States. The article cites the resignation letter of Joe Kent, Trump’s own National Counterterrorism Center director, who quit in March, writing that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

Article II: Defying Congress’s order to end the war, Section 5(c). On June 3 the House and on June 23 the Senate passed a concurrent resolution directing the President to remove U.S. forces from Iran, the first time in American history both chambers had done that. Three days later, Hegseth kept bombing anyway and never stopped.

Article III: Blowing through the 60-day clock, Section 5(b). Trump notified Congress on March 2. The 60-day window expired May 1. No certification for the 30-day extension was ever sent. Even the maximum possible extension ran out on June 1. Hegseth continued the war past every deadline the law allows, pursuing new military objectives rather than winding down.

Article IV: Ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties. This is the one. Within the first hour of the war, three Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, on a Saturday morning with between 170 and 264 students inside, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. The first missile collapsed the roof. The kids were moved to a prayer room to wait for rescuers. The second and third missiles hit it. At least 156 people died, including at least 120 schoolchildren, 26 teachers, seven parents trying to get their kids out, and a teacher’s unborn child. Massie’s article says this wasn’t fog of war. It says Hegseth asked Congress to repeal the civilian harm protection statute, gutted the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, killed funding for the Army’s casualty tracking database, cut more than 90% of civilian harm mitigation staff at combatant commands, fired the top JAGs of the Army, Navy and Air Force, stripped civilian protection from the National Defense Strategy, and told the largest gathering of generals in American history that “we don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.” The article’s word for the result is “murder.”

Article V: Extrajudicial killings. At least 63 strikes on 67 boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 221 people suspected of smuggling drugs, none of them charged, none of them tried, under an August 2025 execute order that required only “reasonable certainty” someone was affiliated with a cartel and did not require drugs or weapons to even be on the boat. On September 2, 2025, the first strike of the campaign, two survivors were clinging to wreckage 45 minutes later when a second strike was ordered to kill them. On December 30, 2025, eight shipwrecked survivors were left in the water for roughly 45 hours until every one of them had died. Massie calls that denial of quarter and refusal to rescue the shipwrecked, which have been war crimes since before Hegseth’s grandparents were born.

Article VI: Suppressing free speech. Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain who flew 39 combat missions, told service members “you can refuse illegal orders.” Hegseth’s Pentagon threatened to recall him to active duty for court-martial, ordered the Navy to review him, issued a formal letter of censure in January 2026, threatened him with criminal prosecution and a reduction in retired rank, and then argued in federal court that a sitting United States senator has diminished First Amendment rights because he once wore a uniform.

Article VII: Kidnapping a sovereign foreign leader. Operation Absolute Resolve, January 3, 2026. More than 200 special operators and 150 aircraft hit Caracas, destroyed Venezuela’s air defences, grabbed Nicolás Maduro and his wife, killed at least 83 people including civilians, and cost seven American casualties. The stated reason was narcotics enforcement. The article quotes Trump, standing next to Hegseth after the raid, announcing that the U.S. would “run the country” and send in “our very large United States oil companies” to “start making money.” No declaration of war. No authorization. Regime change for oil, by Massie’s reading.

Article VIII: Unlawful war in Yemen. Operation Rough Rider, March to May 2025, more than 1,100 strikes in 52 days, an estimated 224 civilians dead, nearly as many as the previous 23 years of U.S. operations in Yemen combined. No congressional authorization, and the War Powers notification arrived 13 days late. The kicker is the leaked Signal chat, where Hegseth himself wrote “we can easily pause,” Vance said there was a strong argument for delaying a month, and Joe Kent said “there is nothing time sensitive driving this timeline.” Hegseth’s stated reasons for not waiting were that it might leak and look indecisive, and that Israel might go first. Not one of those is an imminent threat to the United States, which is the only legal basis he had.

That’s the bill. Four counts on Iran, one on the boats, one on Venezuela, one on Yemen, one on trying to court-martial a senator for quoting the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Yassamin Ansari’s separate Democratic articles from April, which add reckless endangerment of U.S. troops and “bringing disrepute upon the United States and its armed forces,” are sitting right next to them. The House that reconvenes in January is the most Democratic in a generation and it owes nothing to Mike Johnson’s calendar.

So here’s Hegseth’s November. He can resign and hope the subpoenas don’t follow him to the private sector, which they will. He can beg Blackburn for a Senate seat she’d be committing political suicide to give him, in a state whose own party rules say he’s a tourist. Or he can stay and wait for Trump, who has already fired Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi this year, to decide that the only thing standing between him and a narrative where the war was someone else’s fault is a former Fox weekend host who told him everything was fine.

Trump said Wednesday he has “no plans” to change his cabinet. He also said he’d work with Democrats. Byron Donalds, term-limited and conveniently available, is already being floated by Trump’s own people as the replacement. The President who never takes responsibility for anything has found a man to take it for him, and the man is trying to crawl out a window into the United States Senate while 120 dead schoolgirls wait in a House Judiciary filing cabinet for a vote.

Pete Hegseth is really going to have to lean on the God that told him to murder fishermen in the Caribbean and an entire school of young girls in Iran for the next few months.