We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

A group of Republican senators who will be responsible for confirming Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth expressed confidence in him after meeting with him on Monday.

Hegseth, accompanied by his wife, met with about a dozen senators at the Capitol, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Rick Scott (R-FL), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and Tommy Tuberville (R-NC).

They issued their full support of him despite a string of hit pieces by the corporate media centering on allegations from about a decade ago.

Blackburn posted on X:

Pete Hegseth is an outstanding choice for Secretary of Defense.

I am confident he will bolster our military and make an excellent addition to the Trump administration.

Cruz posted after the meeting:

Great meeting with President-Elect Trump’s Secretary of Defense nominee @PeteHegseth.

Pete has a decorated military career and a stellar academic background.

He is laser-focused on ending the wokeness that has overtaken the Armed Forces.

Under his leadership, the DOD will return to making America and our allies safer around the globe.

Lee posted on X:

Great meeting with @PeteHegseth and a handful of my colleagues Looking forward to “the people’s Pentagon” being restored under his leadership as Secretary of Defense

Sullivan, a Marine veteran, posted on X:

I had a productive meeting with SecDef nominee @PeteHegseth today. We focused on the importance of restoring lethality and warfighting as the core mission at the Pentagon as well as the strategic importance of Alaska. I’m confident Pete will work to refocus our military on lethality and peace through strength, as well as getting rid of the damaging woke policies of the Biden admin, some of which I witnessed firsthand as a Marine Corps Reserve Officer.

Tuberville told reporters after his meeting with Hegseth, “We had a good meeting. I’ve known Pete for awhile. He’s going to be a great secretary of defense. He understands, as I tell him, we don’t need a general officer, admiral or a person of high command, we need a drill sergeant in the military.”

He added:

We need someone to straighten the military out, to get. the woke, the DEI affiliation out and go from there. He’s got great work ethic, he’s very, very smart, he understands the business side as well as the military side, has been in 20 years, he’s actually fought in wars, but he is a good age, too somebody who can relate to the young men and women we need to recruit in the military.

Our military right now is running on fumes, because we cannot get enough men and women into the military who want to fight for the united states of America because they don’t want to get into a military that’s woke, that doesn’t believe in the past reference of what this countries teaches our military, we need a machine that’s going to protect the country and its allies.

He also posted:

.@PeteHegseth is a decorated veteran and a true patriot.

Axios reported that Scott said, “He’s clearly committed to making sure we have a lethal military that scares the crap out of our enemies.”

The outlet reported Cruz saying, “A year from now, military recruitment numbers will have skyrocketed under Secretary Hegseth,” and Democrats are “highly incentivized to make the confirmation hearing a spectacle” and urged the media to pay attention to “the actual substance of the job.”

Lummis said, according to Axios, “We were embarrassed by our departure from Afghanistan, and we want to restore American confidence in our military.” She added, “all these other issues are side issues.”

The senators’ support came after a hit piece by the New Yorker dredging up allegations from a decade-ago, when Hegseth was a 34-year old Army captain who had recently returned from Afghanistan and was running a veterans advocacy organization, Concerned Veterans for America.

The allegations came from co-workers of Hegseth at CVA who were fired, sources told Breitbart News. The allegations alleged that Hegseth drank heavily at after-work events and holiday parties and contained clear falsehoods, such as that Hegseth was not a combat veteran. Hegseth was awarded two Bronze Stars for two deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a combat infantry badge — clear proof he was in combat.

Compact Magazine in a piece on Monday said two former CVA leaders pushed back against the allegations. The magazine’s founder and editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote:

In interviews with me, two former senior leaders of CVA have denied the “whistleblower” allegations against Hegseth. They insisted that he left the organization voluntarily, without any pressure bearing down on him from its funders. And unlike The New Yorker’s sources, one of Hegseth’s CVA defenders spoke on the record.

Ahmari quoted Sean Parnell, who worked with Hegseth at CVA, as saying, “I was there for most of those alleged incidents, and this stuff is just complete fabrications.”

Parnell said the allegations came from “people who were let go as the organization was growing, who weren’t fulfilling their duties. They just weren’t.”

The other former senior leader called the allegations, “All false,” adding, “These were false allegations made by a group of disgruntled employees fired by Pete.” The former senior leader said in some cases, the complainants attributed their own “carousing” to Hegseth.

Both former senior leaders said Hegseth was not forced out of his position at CVA as the New Yorker claimed.

“That couldn’t be further from the truth,” Parnell said. “This was right before President Trump began his first term. Pete and I were on the media all the time, talking about national security and foreign policy. And he and I became big believers in Trump’s vision of foreign policy. The funders of that organization [CVA] didn’t necessarily believe that. And because of that policy difference, over what America’s foreign and national-security policy should be, Pete parted ways. It was 100 percent professional, political differences.”

Parnell debunked another claim from the piece, which claimed Hegseth abruptly left CVA and had no immediate job options.

“He was a Fox News contributor,” Parnell said, adding he was in negotiations to become a full-time anchor. He said ABC was also interested in him as well.

The other former CVA leader vouched for that, saying, “He left because his role on Fox was growing and he had a book deal.”

“Pete believes that the wars we were involved in [after 9/11] were a disaster for us, for our armed forces, and for the people of those countries. Like a lot of veterans, he believes that he was lied to, and he believes he has to shake up the nat-sec complex. That’s why a lot of people are going after him,” the second former CVA leader said.

Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on ”X”, Truth Social, or on Facebook.