ANALYSIS:
A Democrat has opened another front against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado has an issue with Mr. Hegseth’s choice for a special legal adviser. That person is Navy Reserve Cmdr. Timothy Parlatore, a criminal defense attorney who has won some big military trial verdicts and once worked on President Trump’s defense team.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 29, and subsequently on X videos, Mr. Crow asked a series of innuendo-tinged questions. And he castigated Mr. Hegseth for “hiding” Cmdr. Parlatore from the commander in chief.
This is a bizarre allegation given these facts: Mr. Hegseth swore in Cmdr. Parlatore at a recommissioning ceremony in his office on March 7, 2025, and the officer then posted the event photo on his X account, which Mr. Hegseth then reposted.
“Congrats Tim!,” the defense secretary said. “You have always had the back of war fighters –– honored to have you.”
Cmdr. Parlatore posted: “This morning @secDef@PeteHegseth commissioned me back into the Navy Reserves and a member of the U.S. Navy JAG Corps after a 12-year break in service.”
The new guy’s No. 1 job assignment: advise the secretary on reforms to the military justice system and its Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the Pentagon.
Some background. A Naval Academy graduate, Cmdr. Parlatore went on to practice criminal law, at one time represented Mr. Hegseth, and was hired by Mr. Trump as part of his legal team focusing on special counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. He quit in 2023 after what he said was meddling from a Trump adviser. The Trump campaign called his complaint “unfounded.”
Mr. Hegseth, a Christian conservative, is reforming the Pentagon. He’s working to extinguish former President Joseph R. Biden’s efforts to make the Pentagon more inclusive.
Mr. Hegseth cast aside “diversity” as a theme in favor of unit cohesion. This has riled Democrats, just as much as they didn’t like the operation to snare Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro or the Feb. 28 ongoing war against Iran or his firings of four-star officers.
And then there is Mr. Hegseth’s other project: shaking up the Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the Pentagon. He wants uniformed JAG officers to focus on war fighting laws, not bureaucratic rules. He brought in Cmdr. Parlatore to guide the way.
The hiring has deeply upset Mr. Crow, a former Army paratrooper who hit Mr. Hegseth with allegations during the April 29 House Armed Services hearing.
The next day, Mr. Crow continued the barrage with a new video post on X:
“He knew that I had him. Here’s a man [Parlatore] who has exchanged words with President Trump, who President Trump fired, who President Trump’s legal team accused of lying about them. Who was pushed out of the White House and Pete Hegseth goes around the president and appoints as a special adviser, bypasses the White House personnel process, bypasses the nomination process and has been hiding this person in the Pentagon. So he sure as heck does not want President Trump and [chief of staff] Susie Wiles and everyone else in the White House to know he is hiding and covering for this man.”
Cmdr. Parlatore counterattacked, posting: “False. This was well covered at the time and your staffers could easily verify. @RepJasonCrow why do you feel the need to lie about this?”
Next, Cmdr. Parlatore sent to Mr. Crow a five-page response, on Parlatore Law Group letterhead, to list the lies.
“You had a great many questions and remarkably few facts,” he told the congressman about his televised attack on Mr. Hegseth. “Since your staff evidently did not prepare you with accurate information beforehand, I am writing to correct the record.”
Cmdr. Parlatore said his hiring as a special adviser does not require Senate confirmation.
To Mr. Crow’s assertion he lacked a security clearance, Cmdr. Parlatore said he already held a “secret” clearance through the U.S. Navy JAG Corps at the time of his Hegseth commissioning. He was subsequently upgraded to Top Secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information).
As to Mr. Crow’s allegations that he has a conflict of interest, Cmdr. Parlatore wrote, “Your suggestion that the mere existence of a private law practice alongside reserve service creates a conflict of interest is either deliberately deceptive or malicious or grossly ignorant misunderstanding of a framework that you yourself have been a part of … ”
On Mr. Crow’s suggestion that he is a foreign agent, he said, “Repeating anonymous gossip as fact from privileged platform is not oversight. It is recklessness with someone else’s reputation.”
He said that if Mr. Crow’s staff had checked, they would have found he had not filed as a foreign agent with the Justice Department because he is not one. And if they checked court records, they would see he has no foreign clients.
As to Mr. Crow’s assertion that he travels regularly with Mr. Hegseth, the commander said, “I have accompanied him on exactly two day trips, one to Annapolis, one to Quantico, each lasting a few hours.”
Cmdr. Parlatore suggested a defamation suit down the line, noting that social media posts do not give a member of Congress such legal protection.
Here’s another example of just how out of joint Democrats are regarding Mr. Hegseth. The next day on CNN, Rep. Seth Moulton, Massachusetts Democrat who is campaigning for the Senate, compared him to a Nazi U-boat commander because of U.S. airstrikes on boats.
At the hearing, Mr. Hegseth steadfastly defended his friend and adviser.
I asked Cmdr. Parlatore whether the White House had expressed displeasure with him becoming a Hegseth adviser.
“Not to me,” he said. “And I have seen and spoken with my friend, David Warrington, White House counsel, at multiple Pentagon events that he has attended.”
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