Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is likely to be in the hot seat after the midterm elections in November, if Democrats gain control of the House and possibly even the Senate, as many polls suggest.
That legislative majority would give Democrats the power to convene oversight hearings and subpoena witnesses to testify about Hegseth’s prosecution of the war in Iran and handling of deadly strikes on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is likely to be in the hot seat after the midterm elections in November, if Democrats gain control of the House and possibly even the Senate, as many polls suggest.
That legislative majority would give Democrats the power to convene oversight hearings and subpoena witnesses to testify about Hegseth’s prosecution of the war in Iran and handling of deadly strikes on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean.
Some lawmakers even hope to impeach Hegseth for high crimes and misdemeanors. They accuse the onetime Fox News host of violating two major laws: the War Powers Resolution, which limits how long an unauthorized military conflict can last, and the War Crimes Act, which makes it a federal crime to violate certain international humanitarian laws.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie filed an impeachment resolution against Hegseth in September and is expected to force a vote on the matter when the House returns from its long midterms recess the week after the elections.
In the case of the Iran war, the resolution accuses Hegseth of illegally continuing military strikes against Iran beyond the 60-day clock allowed under the law. He is further accused in the resolution of ordering the extrajudicial killing of over 220 alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific, which even if the narcotics-smuggling charges were true is not grounds for summary execution under U.S. law. The secretary has also been criticized for overseeing secondary strikes on multiple survivors of the boat attacks who were still clinging to the wreckage of their destroyed vessels when they were killed.
Additional matters that Democrats want to investigate include Hegseth’s role in the deadly Feb. 28 missile strike on the Minab elementary school in Iran, which killed over 150 people, including 120 children; his sharing in early 2025 of classified military operational details in a Signal group chat; and his general noncompliance and stonewalling of congressional demands for military information that Congress is entitled access to.
Democratic Rep. Mike Levin is supportive of the drive to impeach Hegseth. The four-term lawmaker and environmental lawyer, who represents a California district with a strong military footprint, spoke with Foreign Policy about the legal and political considerations.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Foreign Policy: If Democrats win the House and potentially even the Senate in the November midterms, you’ve called for Democrats to pursue the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Why impeach Hegseth?
Mike Levin: Hegseth took us into this war without asking and kept it going with no vote or no consideration of the votes to end it. I think he’s consistently betrayed his oath.
It’s not just about the war in Iran, although there are some very specific things that I have deep concern with, such as the Minab elementary school in the early stages of the war. But it’s also about the boat strikes [in South America]. It’s about Signalgate. It’s about obstruction as well.
We do know from the two Trump impeachments that the appetite of the Senate to convict is virtually nonexistent. But it’s important that we understand what the founders intended for the impeachment power to be used for. In this instance, you have an out-of-control secretary who is both incredibly arrogant and incompetent, and those are very dangerous things to combine.
FP: What is your response to the argument that Democrats are overreacting to what amounts to strong disagreements over policy and that if Democrats pursue impeachment against Hegseth, how are they any different from House Republicans who in 2024 impeached then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas?
ML: With Mayorkas, they were claiming that he was violating federal law, but those claims were dicey at best, as opposed to here, where I think it’s fairly clear whether it’s the War Powers Act, whether it’s the War Crimes Act. It’s tough to prove corrupt intent with obstruction, but I think he has committed obstruction as a constitutional matter. He ginned up this cease-fire pause argument, but there is no provision in the War Powers Act that says that. They just made it up. Ultimately, if that were litigated, even the Supreme Court would acknowledge that there’s no part of the War Powers Act that includes the ability to pause for cease-fire in an ongoing conflict where you have major combat operations in the same theater both before and after the cease-fire. It directly contradicts the law.
On the boat strikes, you have the [U.S. Defense Department] Law of War manual. There are those in Congress who have studied this and know this far more than I, including our veterans [such as] Jason Crow and Chris DeLuzio. What they have said is: If people are shipwrecked and they want out of the fight, you’re not allowed to go kill everybody. I think that’s fairly cut and dried. So, I think it’s really apples and oranges from Mayorkas, where you had federal immigration law.
FP: Should the other matters—including the elementary school attack, Signalgate, and the obstruction of information—Congress is lawfully entitled to be pursued via committee hearings and the subpoena process?
ML: For purposes of an impeachment resolution today, my own opinion is that to the extent high crimes and misdemeanors have been committed sufficient to justify an impeachment vote, it’s on the basis of those two laws that I think fairly clearly have been broken. These are not just any two laws. These are two laws bedrock to our values as a nation, to the Constitution, to our norms.
There are far more Republicans, particularly more traditional Reagan-Bush Republicans, in the Congress who know this. My hope is that more of them will be willing to break from what is so clearly unprecedented, unconstitutional, and illegal.
FP: Democrats impeached President Trump twice—in 2019 over Ukraine, and then again in 2021 over the Jan. 6 insurrection. Considering that the president was able to persuade a plurality of American voters [in the 2024 presidential election] to send him back to the White House, are there political lessons that Democrats should draw from how they pursue an impeachment of Hegseth?
ML: There are things that we learned from the two Trump impeachments. One is you have to build the record. The Jan. 6 committee took its time; they put Republican witnesses under oath. I think they moved public sentiment and did so effectively. The first impeachment followed an inquiry, but there were fights over lots of the witnesses and things like that and perhaps didn’t move public opinion as much.
The key is a very simple story is very important as it regards public sentiment.
People understand killing survivors on the water. They understand a war Congress voted to end. People can understand that pretty simply. You have to have crossover votes as well, you have to have bipartisan support, or you’re not going to get very far. Ultimately, Republicans have to be courageous enough to help carry the message, otherwise it just reads to independents as being another partisan fight.
Impeachment is the tool the founders gave us to hold the president and other executive officials to account. There are still some reasonable Democrats that disagree on whether it was all worth it to impeach Donald Trump. I personally think that, as a matter of principle, putting the record down for history, had I to do it over again, I think that’s more important than the alternative.