Conservative commentators slammed Senator Tim Kaine for asking Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth about sexual misconduct allegations against him because of the Democrat‘s ties to philandering former President Bill Clinton.
“Tim Kaine was grilling him on his marriages,” Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt said on the morning chat show’s Wednesday broadcast. “He was best friends with Bill Clinton, he ran as Hillary Clinton’s running mate, and Bill Clinton was accused of rape, exposing himself and sexual assault.”
The former president is the subject of multiple sexual assault and harassment claims, dating from the 1960s to the 1990s, all of which he has denied.
After initially lying about it, Clinton confessed to having an affair while in office with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which lasted from 1995 to 1997 and began when he was 49 and she was 22.
At a Tuesday Senate confirmation hearing for Hegseth, who President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to lead the Pentagon, Kaine was among the former Fox News host’s most aggressive interrogators.
He pilloried Hegseth over his history of marital infidelities—at one point jousting, “you have admitted that you had sex while you were married to wife two after you had just fathered a child by wife three”—while probing him about a 2017 sexual assault allegation.
Kaine also invoked the marital oaths that the thrice-married Hegseth would have taken as reason to doubt he would uphold an oath of office in government.
Hegseth conceded that he is “not a perfect person” but said he has reformed his ways following a deepening of his Christian faith.
Earhardt‘s line of attack, meanwhile, echoed another conservative commentator, former Fox host Megyn Kelly, who said a day earlier on her radio show that the “holier than thou” Kaine “was fine with Bill Clinton.”
Earhardt’s co-host Brian Kilmeade also raised Clinton’s disputed ties to the late sex trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “Don’t forget his trips on Epstein’s plane,” he said.
Clinton has acknowledged he was a one-time associate of Epstein’s, and records show he flew on the criminal’s notorious ‘Lolita Express’ private jet, but has denied knowledge of any illegal activities. (President-elect Trump was a longtime associate of Epstein’s—the sex criminal bragged in private that he was Trump’s “closest friend.”)
While Kaine was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, the source of Earhardt‘s claim that he was “best friends” with her husband is unclear.
The former president came around to supporting Kaine when his wife was vetting potential running mates, but Kaine described getting grilled by Bill in an introductory meeting as making him feel “like a prospective son-in-law.”
Kaine also said in 2002 that he believed Clinton should have resigned over the Lewinsky scandal, at the same time calling for the subject of a local Virginia politics sex scandal to step down.
In 2016, he said there was no reason to “re-litigate” the Lewinsky affair, but reiterated that he was “disappointed” in Clinton.
Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones ended the show’s discussion of Kaine with a shot at Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who admitted to an affair during his first marriage, by noting he and Kaine had been photographed together.
The conservative efforts at whataboutism to deflection from allegations against Hegseth weren’t limited to claims of sexual impropriety.
Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin spent Tuesday claiming—in response to allegations that Hegseth had been visibly intoxicated at work throughout his careers as a broadcaster and veterans advocate—that his lawmaking colleagues had cast votes while drunk.