DOJ Begs Judge to Ignore Hegseth as She Considers Making Him Testify

A federal judge is considering forcing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to testify in court about his anti-transgender statements for a lawsuit challenging the U.S. military’s ban on transgender people.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said in court in Washington, D.C., Wednesday that she might compel Hegseth to sit for a one-hour deposition and answer questions about the anti-trans views he has expressed.

“I’m very aware that he is the secretary of defense and he has a lot of constraints on his time. But he has time to tweet and put out videos and speak to generals, and I think it’s fair game,” Reyes said, according to The Washington Sun’s Jose Pagliery.

First, though, Reyes said she’d give Hegseth the chance to respond to 10 written questions, and if he isn’t forthcoming enough and is too “lawyerly,” then he’d have to sit for the deposition.

The Department of Justice’s lawyers, meanwhile, don’t want Reyes to take Hegseth’s past statements or social media posts into consideration.

“The Supreme Court has held that courts should not look outside the operative terms of a policy—as this Court did with respect to certain social media posts—in assessing the basis on which a policy classifies,” the DOJ wrote in a four-page court filing Tuesday seeking summary judgment in favor of the government from Reyes.

Hegseth has a long history of making anti-trans comments—both in public and on social media.

On February 27, 2025, Hegseth shared an official Department of War post stating, “Transgender service members are disqualified from service without an exemption.” On April 20 the same year, he posted, “Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI—all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD.” On April 24, he called Reyes “a rogue judge” and claimed there were “Zero readiness reasons for trans troops.”

In a speech on May 6, Hegseth declared, “No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.” And after the Supreme Court later allowed the ban to remain in place while the legal battle continued, Hegseth posted on May 8, “After a SCOTUS victory for @POTUS, TRANS is out at the DOD.”

In Reyes’s March 2025 ruling temporarily halting the military’s ban, well before these posts, she said the military’s policy was “soaked in animus and dripping with pretext.” That proved prescient, as in June this year, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ban in a 2–1 decision.

The Pentagon is trying to delay enforcement of that decision, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court, while the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, service members who are already being pushed out, want the appeals court to mandate compliance immediately.

Witch hunts are back in vogue with Kansas Republicans—literally.

Ty Masterson, the Republican candidate in the Kansas gubernatorial race, accused his Democratic opponent, Cindy Holscher, of being an actual witch capable of “demonic” magic, while speaking at the Praise Chapel in Wichita on Sunday.

Masterson introduced the dubious portion of his pseudo-sermon by suggesting that God wanted him to run for Kansas’s top political office.

“God’s armies are out there in this,” Masterson said. “What we’re fighting right now is a spiritual battle that I’ve never seen before, in [this] state, in this politics.

“Evil is maturing with the brotherhood, and it is rising to a level that is just in your face,” Masterson continued as a pianist played a contemplative melody beside him. “Really, my race and the U.S. Senate race with Roger Marshall versus [Adam] Hamilton. Those are spiritual battles.

“Like I said, my opponent, she didn’t even hide it,” Masterson added. “She talked—they had witch—I mean, they’re doing like witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship. I mean, they’re like … it’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing, right? Just in your face that way.”

The state senator had seemingly drawn his conclusions from a series of playful TikTok videos posted by Holscher’s 20-year-old daughter, Maddie, who had shared clips of her and her mom brushing their teeth set to a song from the Wicked soundtrack.

“Casting a spell so my mom wins Kansas Governor except she’s so done with me,” Maddie Holscher captioned one clip from April, in which she waves her arms around her mother.

The unserious memes offered voters a fun porthole into the Democratic candidate’s family life. In May, Holscher said that the “goofy” videos her daughter makes “mean a lot” to her, and encouraged people to check them out.

The younger Holscher responded to the Republican backlash on Tuesday, facetiously declaring alongside a childhood Halloween picture that “unfortunately the allegations are true.” In the image, Holscher and her sibling are dressed up as witches, wands at the ready. “I’ve been practicing since elementary school … and I guess my sister has been, too.”

Masterson is obviously grasping at straws to dismantle Holscher’s odds. Republicans have recently ramped up spending in the Sunflower State, throwing millions of dollars at Masterson’s campaign to gain an advantage in the governor’s race. As of late last month, the GOP had spent $16.6 million on broadcast and digital expenditures in the race, compared to $4.7 million spent by Democrats, according to the Sunflower State Journal.

You can watch the video below. The portion discussing witchcraft starts at the 35:45 mark.

In September, Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy posted (and quickly deleted) a video on social media featuring himself shaking hands with a registered sex offender. He again featured that same man in a television campaign ad a month later, according to reporting from The Bulwark.

In 2006, Amherst, Ohio, resident Vernon Edwards pleaded guilty to “gross sexual imposition,” which according to Ohio law involves sexual contact with a minor. He was charged in a case involving a 13-year-old girl, though he faced many similar allegations against his nieces.

While Edwards didn’t have a speaking role in Ramaswamy’s commercial, he’s included in the B-roll footage as his wife Patty speaks about how the embattled gubernatorial candidate lowered her property taxes.

The Ramaswamy campaign said it had no prior knowledge of Edwards’s criminal history.

“This ad was based on a real interaction between Vivek and an Ohio woman who was distraught at a county fair because she may have to move out of her home due to rising property taxes. We had no knowledge of the circumstances now being reported,” Ramaswamy spokesperson Evan Machan told The Bulwark. “The man has been removed from the ad. The fact of the matter is that property taxes are insanely high and causing many Ohioans to consider moving out of their homes. Vivek is the leader who will fix it.”

Patty told The Bulwark that the charges against her husband, which he pleaded guilty to 20 years ago, were “false.”

“Even if [the allegations] were true, the man did do his time back to society, and he has been an exemplary citizen at this point,” she said, referring to the eight years in prison her husband was sentenced to. “And again, Vivek reached out to me. I am not accused of anything. I am an American citizen. I’m allowed to do this.”

Ramaswamy is currently locked in a close midterm race with Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton.

The new White House press secretary is facing a legal complaint over misrepresenting her credentials as a lawyer.

The Campaign for Accountability, a liberal nonprofit organization focusing on ethics, filed a complaint with the State Bar of California Wednesday over whether Katie Zacharia falsely claimed to work as a lawyer. The complaint cited her claims of holding titles such as “outside counsel” to the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, and “general counsel” to a California-based nonprofit organization run by Trump administration official Ric Grenell.

“According to published reporting, Ms. Zacharia has never been admitted to practice law in California or in any other state or the District of Columbia. If that reporting is accurate, Ms. Zacharia has repeatedly held herself out to the public as entitled to practice law without a license to do so, conduct California law treats as a crime,” Michelle Kuppersmith, Campaign for Accountability’s executive director, wrote in the complaint.

Zacharia has a J.D. from Pepperdine University according to her LinkedIn profile, but according to an investigation by Popular Info’s Judd Legum, she never passed any state legal bar exam.

When reporters at the White House asked her Tuesday where she had passed the bar, she bizarrely answered, “in China.” U.S. state bar exams can’t be taken remotely and the Chinese equivalent is off-limits to foreigners. Despite this, her work history says that she worked at the Beijing-based Zhong Lun law firm as an associate on the international practice team between 2011 and 2013.

The White House seems to have missed or ignored all of the holes in Zacharia’s résumé, and it remains to be seen if President Trump wants to keep her around, especially after her disastrous first press briefing.

At least six different anti–Iran war protesters were removed from the Association of the United States Army conference on Wednesday for interrupting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his remarks on a drone panel. 

One protester could be heard shouting about “pulling children’s body parts out from under the rubble” before being escorted out. She was also holding a “No War With Iran” banner, according to The Washington Sun’s Joe Gould. Hegseth waited calmly while she was removed. “She thinks highly of me,” he joked. 

Another protester interrupted him just seconds after.   

“You’re not a warrior, you’re a coward!” they screamed. “Why are you all here making money off of bombs killing my family? What the fuck is wrong with all of you?”

Hegseth attempted to continue on, but was interrupted yet again. 

“How many children [have to be killed] in Palestine and Gaza—,” a protester yelled, before masculine chants of “USA! USA!” drowned them out. 

“We spend $1.5 trillion on war…. We’re spending more money killing children in Gaza when children in America are starving!” yelled yet another protester. Those onstage with Hegseth mused that it was a “semi-coordinated effort.” 

“He’s a war criminal! You are all, all to blame!” 

“The world fucking hates you!” said the sixth protester. “We fucking hate you! You’re a fucking war criminal, you’re a Nazi! You should be ashamed of yourself!” he said. 

Hegseth and those sharing the stage with him framed these protests as a “coordinated effort” to delegitimize what they were saying. But even still, the vast majority of Americans (65 percent) disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the war on Iran—as do the soldiers who were forced to remain on aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea for months on end. 

Trump and Hegseth’s war has cost Americans about $45 billion so far—about $2,000 per household, according to CNN. Most groups have the Iranian death toll of this war at around 3,000 people, with nearly 400 of them being children.