‘You seem to really like Joe Biden’: Hegseth needlessly fixates on former president

Toward the beginning of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the panel’s top Democrat, pressed the Pentagon chief on the administration’s missteps on Ukraine. Hegseth responded with a curious claim.

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“Joe Biden, with no accountability, gave hundreds of billions of dollars of our weapons to Ukraine,” the secretary testified, as part of an answer that appeared wholly disconnected from the question.

The obvious problem with Hegseth’s line was that he wildly exaggerated what actually happened in the previous administration. As The New York Times reported:

According to a New York Times analysis of Pentagon records and statements, the Biden administration sent Ukraine $33.8 billion in weapons from Defense Department stockpiles under a program called the Presidential Drawdown Authority. The Biden administration also gave Ukraine $33.2 billion in cash to purchase weapons directly from U.S. defense companies under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. That totals about $67 billion in military support since the war began.

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But the less obvious problem was that this was the first of several exchanges in which Hegseth, unprompted, fixated on Donald Trump’s Democratic predecessor.