As President-elect Donald Trump's second administration comes into clearer focus, one newly announced Cabinet pick may ring a bell for several Minnesotans. Trump has tapped "Fox and Friends" host Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense.
While he's known to most of America as a Fox News personality, here are a few things we learned from the Star Tribune archives and other media reports about Hegseth:
He grew up in Forest Lake
Hegseth graduated from Forest Lake Area High School in 1999, where he played football and basketball. He went on to attend Princeton University on an ROTC scholarship, where he continued playing basketball.
Hegseth served in the Army
Hegseth joined the Army after he graduated from Princeton and served with the 101st Airborne in 2005-2006, according to the Star Tribune archives. In 2005, the then-lieutenant spoke to the newspaper about the conditions at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, where he defended the facility against criticism.
"Photographers sometimes take pictures that make it look like American soldiers are putting the detainees in dog cages," he told Katherine Kersten, then a Star Tribune columnist. "That's very misleading."
A year before that, three British Muslim prisoners had reported several instances of torture, forced drugging and religious persecution.
He founded a political advocacy organization for veterans
Hegseth was the founder and longtime executive director of Vets for Freedom, a group that advocates for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In 2008, the Star Tribune reported that Forest Lake Area High School withdrew from an event organized by Hegseth over concerns that it would be overly political.
The organization's website stated that the National Heroes Tour was about "rallying the country to complete the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan." When a Star Tribune reporter asked Hegseth if that line could be construed as political, he said the group would agree not to promote the "progress made in Iraq and Afghanistan."
You can read more about Hegseth at the links below.
