Massie Moves to Impeach Hegseth as Democrats Flip Colorado Seat and Widen House Edge

CNN reported that Republican Rep. Thomas Massie was leading an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and that a House vote could come as early as the next morning. CNN said there were likely enough votes to impeach Hegseth in the House. An anchor noted that Republicans still controlled the House.

According to the report, Massie argued that Hegseth is a threat to the Constitution if he remains in office.

Trump said that even if Hegseth were impeached, he would stand by his defense secretary. He pointed to the two wars the administration had won under Hegseth's leadership and said, 'We all won.' Trump also called Massie 'a stone-cold loser.'

Asked whether he had enough Republican support to defeat the impeachment, Trump said he was not worried about that.

CNN projected that Democrats were flipping another Republican House seat. The network said Eileen Laubacher had defeated Republican Congresswoman and Trump ally Lauren Boebert, winning by 3,237 votes. The call gave Democrats 256 seats, and 15 races were still to be called.

Democrats were leading in three of the outstanding seats currently held by Republicans, and had a net gain of 42 seats, the most since 2018. Democrats also led in the Senate with 54 seats, while the high-profile races in Mississippi and Alaska had not yet been called, though Democrats were leading in both.

Six days after the midterms, which CNN described as one of the most crushing losses in political history, Trump wrote online asking whether anyone really believed the election was honest and how the polls could be so wrong. He said some early voting dumps were so large it was impossible to win no matter how many people voted, and he blamed the machines.

CNN called the allegations absurd and noted that Democrats had also won in multiple states where Republicans controlled the count, including Texas, where Democrat Talarico received more early votes than Republican Paxton received combined.

CNN said that the day after the election, Trump told the New York Times he was absolutely willing to accept the results of the midterm elections and was prepared to work with Democrats. CNN described that statement as out of character compared with his later claims that the election was rigged.

CNN's Kristen Holmes reported from outside the White House that Trump was publicly standing behind Hegseth even as Republicans might have enough votes to impeach him, and that not everyone was buying Trump's public position. Holmes said allies and advisers who had spoken with Trump in the last two days believed there was a strong likelihood Hegseth could still be asked to resign if he was impeached.

Holmes said there was concern at the White House that Republicans had the votes to impeach Hegseth in the House, even though officials did not believe it would go anywhere in the Senate. She also said that Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, who had been speculated as someone who might appoint Hegseth to her Senate seat, does not intend to appoint him, which would have offered an exit for the administration.

Holmes said she was hearing increased speculation from all corners of Trump's orbit that Hegseth is going to run for president in 2028. She said what happens in the coming weeks would play a role in that.

In the discussion, one speaker asked how worried Hegseth should be that a Republican-led effort in a Republican House could get him impeached. The speaker said that would be the kind of thing that leaves a mark and does not help in a primary, especially given the narrow margin and because Massie's articles were legitimate rather than political theater.

The speaker added that Hegseth could face impeachment later if Democrats controlled Congress, and noted that a lame-duck Republican Congress could allow Trump to pick a successor, a window that would close in January.

Trump said Hegseth had won two wars and questioned why others were not impeached instead. He asked about impeaching a former president's administration over a period when a person disappeared for two weeks, the leaders who ran the Vietnam War, and those who ran the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he described as stupid wars in which nothing was gained.

A speaker said the American people had rejected the war and that the administration was doubling down, and expected the impeachment vote to astonish lawmakers who may not be listening to voters. The speaker argued that voters might give moderate Republicans courage to act, though they were not holding their breath for Republicans to show it.

Another speaker said Hegseth was never qualified to be defense secretary, accused him of denigrating women, particularly women of color, and of denigrating the military's top brass, and said he had been an embarrassment. The speaker also claimed the Iran war had not been won and that gas prices showed its cost to Americans.

With Boebert's loss, Democrats reached 256 seats in the House, and the count could rise above 260. Speakers said Boebert had been a major Trump ally and that the race had been close. She had been moved into a seat that was supposed to be safer after redistricting, which speakers said showed the depth and breadth of the wave, even in Colorado.

Speakers said many Trump loyalists had been wiped out because they enabled behavior that constituents, even in conservative districts, rejected.

A speaker said the Democratic Party was now different from the one that had won the House before, and was not going to be distracted by ideological differences. The speaker recalled that such differences had dominated the news cycle in 2018 and said the party would instead focus on the things it ran on rather than be overtaken by a Trump focus.