Hegseth Impeachment Buried 211 to 204: House Republicans Send Massie's Eight Articles to Committee - and Trump Calls It an Exoneration
The Tuesday-night vote derails the planned Wednesday impeachment vote and parks the articles in a Trump-allied committee until they expire with this Congress. Hegseth called the effort a farce; Massie predicts the secretary still will not last the year.
The House voted 211 to 204 on Tuesday night to send the impeachment resolution against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the Judiciary Committee, effectively derailing the planned Wednesday vote on whether to bring formal charges against him. The committee is controlled by allies of President Donald Trump, who decide when topics and votes are scheduled, and it is expected not to take the issue up before this two-year Congress ends on January 3 - at which point the articles would formally expire and Democrats would have to produce a new version to try again in the new year.
The articles were introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the antiwar Republican who was the only member of his party to vote against Tuesday night's motion. Massie's eight articles relate to waging war in Iran without congressional approval and strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, among other counts, and accuse Hegseth of high crimes and misdemeanours over the Iran war and elsewhere. The articles are allegations, not findings; impeachment itself would have required only a House majority, while conviction and removal would require two-thirds of the Senate.
Hegseth answered at a press conference on Tuesday - his first in six months - calling the effort “a farce, and it's a stunt, and everybody knows it,” and “a political spectacle, a personal manifesto driven by ego and resentment.” He insisted that “everything has been lawful from day one” in the Iran, Yemen and Caribbean operations. Trump, who on Monday delivered his most forceful endorsement yet - “He won the war. He was in charge” - wrote on Truth Social after the vote that the Democrats' attempt to impeach Hegseth had “miserably FAILED,” called Massie “a major LOSER,” and called the result the “EXONERATION of a Great American Patriot.”
Massie is not treating the referral as the end. He warned on Monday of underlings testifying against Hegseth in a congressional investigation, predicted “a high probability” that Hegseth will not make it to December 31, and said of Trump's backing: “They stand by them until the day they don't.” Only two Cabinet secretaries in American history have ever been impeached - William Belknap in 1876 and Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024 - and neither was convicted by the Senate.
