Pentagon pick left Guard after being reported as possible ‘insider threat’ due to tattoo

The day after the D.C. National Guard was deployed to secure a U.S. Capitol desecrated by Jan. 6 rioters, a photo of one Guard member - his tattoos clearly visible as he emerged shirtless from the Hudson River after a charity swim - circulated in an online chat of military and intelligence officers.

The soldier was well known among the group as the Fox News host Pete Hegseth. But in a moment of high national anxiety, and with the Guard set to protect the Capitol ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration, some in the chat raised concerns about his tattoos.

Travis Akers, then a naval intelligence officer, told The Washington Post that he looked further and spotted a close-up image Hegseth posted of his bicep months earlier that clearly showed the Latin words “Deus Vult.” Researching the phrase online, Akers found that it was a Christian battle cry from the First Crusade in the Middle Ages: “God wills it.” Though the phrase remains in use among some ordinary Christians, especially Catholics, Akers said his research showed that it had become popular with the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and other extremists groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol.

Akers posted the photos to the app then known as Twitter, calling the tattoos “white supremacist symbols” - an interpretation Hegseth has since forcefully denied. The tweet was forwarded to the D.C. National Guard’s head of physical security, Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, who soon warned commanding general William J. Walker that the Latin phrase suggested Hegseth could be an “insider threat.”

As he was about to be deployed, Hegseth - now President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary - received a call from his superior officer ordering him to stand down rather than report for duty for the inaugural events, according to an officer later briefed on the events as well as Hegseth’s own accounts in writings and interviews.

Hegseth’s removal from the mission became a seminal moment in his life. He has cited the episode in asserting that the military in which he’d served in two wars abroad and during riots at home following the death of George Floyd had become dangerously “woke.” In his telling, Guard officials were focused on a cross tattoo on his chest, not the Latin phrase that records and interviews show most concerned military officials.

Hegseth, who did not respond to emails and messages left on his phone, wrote in the opening lines of his most recent book, “The War on Warriors,” that he left the military because of the episode.

“I joined the Army in 2001 because I wanted to serve my country. Extremists attacked us on 9/11, and we went to war,” Hegseth wrote. “Twenty years later, I was deemed an ‘extremist’ by that very same Army … the military I loved, I fought for, I revered … spit me out.”

Hegseth’s nomination has sparked controversy because of his lack of experience leading large organizations as well as critical statements he has made about military leadership, women serving in combat units and the Muslim faith — and most recently because of an alleged sexual assault in 2017. A lawyer for Hegseth has denied the assault claim, saying that the encounter was consensual, and police in Monterey, California, investigated, but prosecutors brought no charges.

[Trump defense pick Pete Hegseth paid accuser but denies sexual assault, attorney says]

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said Hegseth has “the necessary experience and impressive qualifications” to implement Trump’s policies. “We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense,” Cheung wrote in an email.

Neither Walker nor the D.C. National Guard responded to requests for comment.

Hegseth, who had served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent more than a decade in the Guard, wrote in the book, published this year, that he was floored by the surprise order. He was not told at the time the real reason he was barred from the inaugural mission, he wrote. “We don’t need you. We’re good,” Hegseth recalled his superior simply saying.

Hegseth said he stewed over the ensuing days. He wondered if he’d been excluded because he was an outspoken Trump supporter, Fox News personality or just because it was well known that he didn’t like Biden. According to his book, he became convinced there was a cultural or political reason he was being kept from the mission, reinforcing his sense that something had gone terribly wrong with the U.S. military.

“It was the strangest feeling, like my foundations had shifted - leaving me out of balance,” Hegseth wrote. The D.C. Guard “turned their back on me. The message was clear: you are not wanted here. So, I resigned. On Jan. 20, 2021, I drafted the letter. F*** Biden anyway.”

Gaither, who retired from the military after nearly 26 years of service, said he stands by his decision to raise up the chain of command the concerns brought to him about Hegseth, and was later told Hegseth would not deploy for the inaugural. His email to Walker was first reported by Reuters.

Earl G. Matthews, who was then serving as the senior legal affairs officer in the D.C. National Guard, told The Post that he believes ordering Hegseth away from the inauguration was a mistake and an “overreaction” to events in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack.

Matthews, who also served in Trump’s first transition and as a political appointee in his term, said he learned of the Hegseth episode at some point after the inauguration and was troubled it didn’t go through the same review process that the Pentagon had for Guard members coming from out-of-state units.

“Pete Hegseth had been a good soldier,” he said. “This shouldn’t have happened.”

Another military official familiar with Hegseth’s falling out with the D.C. National Guard said concerns about him were not limited to his tattoo. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said some Guard officials believed he “took advantage” of his role in the Guard, including by speaking about his mission in pointed terms on Fox News while pictures of him in uniform were broadcast. Guard officials thought that by removing him from the deployment, they were “protecting ourselves from a potential disaster given his outspoken views.”

Hegseth has written that his problems with the National Guard preceded his tenure in D.C. He alleged in a recent radio interview that he joined the D.C. Guard only after New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) blocked his effort to join a unit of that state’s National Guard in Manhattan. The New York National Guard disputed that point on Friday, telling The Post that the unit Hegseth had sought to join - the 1st Battalion, 69th Infantry - did not have an open slot for someone of his rank. A spokesman for Cuomo also said it wasn’t true and that the governor “had never even heard of” Hegseth until his nomination.

In June 2020, after deploying in response to the Black Lives Matter protests following Floyd’s death, Hegseth appeared twice on Fox News to describe his time that month on the streets of Washington. Without the National Guard, Hegseth said, “Washington, D.C., would be a very different place tonight.”

Hegseth said on Fox that at one point he was stationed at the Vietnam War memorial with “a handful of other guys” to defend the memorial from people who wanted to deface it. “I remember saying a prayer there and thinking, ‘This is what it’s like to be a Vietnam veteran. What they went through, when they came home,’” he said.

Hegseth also said he was at Lafayette Square outside the White House in the days after authorities cleared the area by firing flash grenades and irritants at protesters. Those maneuvers were led by police and riot teams, with Guard soldiers forming a wall behind them to keep protesters from reentering the public park near the White House.

After the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, the FBI and Secret Service began flagging to the Pentagon members of the military who had possible links to extremists, leading to about a dozen National Guard soldiers being barred from deploying with their state units to augment inauguration security.

The Deus Vult tattoo, which appears on Hegseth’s arm as early as 2018, invokes a phrase that has grown popular among some Christians - it is the rallying cry of a Catholic school in New Jersey and the title of a podcast hosted by two Catholic priests. But it has also been used by extremists, including the man who opened fire on two New Zealand mosques in 2019 - killing 49 Muslims - and white nationalists, such as some of those who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. It appeared on at least one flag carried by rioters on Jan. 6.

Military guidelines prohibit soldiers from getting tattoos “affiliated with, depicting, or symbolizing extremist philosophies, organizations, or activities,” although two officials said the D.C. Guard did not have a list of such symbols it was working from when it banned Hegseth from serving at the inaugural.

In his book and in recent appearances, Hegseth said he later learned that a complaint about his tattoos played a role in the revocation of his inauguration orders. It is not clear exactly what Hegseth was told, but in promoting the book he has repeatedly pointed to a tattoo on his chest, known as a Jerusalem cross, as the one that prevented him from participating in the inauguration.

“This one, right here,” he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” pointing to the cross and saying it holds no association with extremist ideology. It’s a tattoo that “many” Christians get to mark their voyage to Jerusalem, said Hegseth, who has spoken of a trip to Israel in 2019. The Jerusalem Cross, a large cross with four smaller crosses around it, was made into a prominent Christian symbol by Crusaders in the 11th century.

But it was the bicep tattoo bearing the phrase “Deus Vult” that Akers, the recently retired naval intelligence officer, flagged as problematic and that the internal Guard email cited as most concerning.

“I thought it was detrimental to good order and discipline to display a symbol co-opted by white nationalists,” Akers, who retired this year, said in an interview with The Post. “It was certainly not reflective of the values of our military and those are to promote equality and diversity.”

Akers, a Democrat who identifies as moderate to liberal and has been openly critical of Hegseth’s nomination, said he suspects that Hegseth was well aware of the symbolism and history of the tattoos. “He’s Ivy League educated and knows the history of the Crusades,” Akers said.

In the 2020 social media post showing the close-up of his bicep, the one that Akers found and that made its way to the D.C. National Guard, Hegseth wrote that a book he had just published would make the meaning clear.

In the book, “American Crusade,” Hegseth ties his belief in an existential struggle over America’s “native” and “Judeo-Christian” culture to the Crusades, writing that Christians, along with their “Jewish friends and freedom-loving people everywhere,” must fight back against secularism, leftism, globalism and Muslim immigration.

“See you on the battlefield,” he writes in closing out the book. “Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”