Lawmakers waiting to give their one-minute speeches on the House floor Tuesday got an unexpected delay: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), reading eight articles of impeachment against Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth out loud.
“People are sitting there waiting for their one minute, and they realized it’s going to be a while before I get to give them one minute,” Massie told Sources Say News.
The Kentucky Republican accuses Hegseth of waging an illegal war on Iran and ignoring Congress when it ordered the war to stop. Massie also urged his colleagues not to vote against the procedural motion, he told Sources Say News.
Because Massie filed the articles as a privileged resolution, leadership can’t quietly bury them. The House must act within two legislative days, which means every Republican will have to go on record about Hegseth.
The Pentagon fired back with a statement praising Hegseth’s record, without addressing any of the charges.
“Secretary Hegseth has been a transformative leader for the Department of War,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said. “By every measurable metric, the Department of War is better under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s leadership than before.”
Wilson added that morale and recruitment are at all-time highs and that “the entire Department is unified behind the Secretary’s vision.”
Massie says the Iran war, launched Feb. 28, never had Congress’s approval. He also says it blew through every deadline in the 1973 War Powers Resolution and kept going after the House and Senate voted in June to bring U.S. troops home.
The articles also tie Hegseth to a U.S. missile strike on an Iranian elementary school on the war’s first day, which they say killed at least 120 children. And they target his campaign of deadly strikes on suspected drug boats, including a follow-up hit that killed two survivors clinging to wreckage. He also goes after Hegseth over the seizure of Nicolás Maduro, a campaign in Yemen, and going after critics.
Massie has been sounding the alarm for months. In July, after the Pentagon quietly lowered its count of U.S. troops killed in Iran, he called the change an “absurd ruse” to pretend there had been two separate wars.
The bad blood runs deep. Hegseth campaigned in Kentucky for Massie’s Trump-backed challenger, Ed Gallrein, who beat Massie in the May primary. Massie leaves office in January.
