Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., says she is willing to consider incoming President Donald Trump’s unorthodox appointments of former Congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.
The Senate has the constitutional role of confirming appointments to cabinet positions. Capito, a member of the leadership team in the Republican majority, addressed some of the appointments in a briefing with West Virginia reporters as well as in appearances with national reporting outlets.
“The President has the right to nominate whomever he wants, and he’s certainly exercising that,” Capito said Thursday afternoon in response to a MetroNews question.
Gaetz, a Republican who resigned from Congress shortly after being named as Trump’s pick for attorney general, has been under an ethics investigation about whether he was involved with the sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl. In 2023, the Justice Department — which Gaetz would oversee — ended a sex trafficking investigation with no charges against Gaetz.
Gaetz is an attorney but mostly has spent his career as an elected representative.
Gabbard is a a former House Democrat representing Hawaii and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who became a high-profile Trump supporter. Director of national intelligence is a position created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Gabbard, a National Guard veteran, did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee while in Congress.
Hegseth has been co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. He is a veteran of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Army National Guard, but he has little direct experience with the Defense Department, a sprawling bureaucracy. The is the author of the book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” which characterizes current military leadership as “following the rest of our country off the cliff of cultural chaos and weakness.”
“I have already weighed in in a positive way,” Capito said of Hegseth. “He has a lot of military experience himself. And you know what, I think this is one of the areas that the Department of Defense that is so laden with bureaucracies and same-thinking through every administration, Republican or Democrat, that I think that Pete will bring a different perspective to this. And so I look forward to how his testimony goes and his applications go. I’m in favor of him being our secretary of defense.”
Capito recalled being on friendly terms with Gabbard when their time overlapped in Congress.
“I know she has served our nation honorably,” Capito said. “We’ll see. It all moves through the committees. We’ll see how she is vetted and what her plans are.”
Capito, though, said she is not prepared so far to endorse the confirmation of Gabbard or Gaetz.
Gaetz, notably, was at the center of significant fights in the House Republican caucus, including a successful charge to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
In a post on Truth Social, Trump praised Gaetz as a “deeply gifted and tenacious attorney” who “has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice.”
“That’s an important nomination, attorney general, and obviously the President feels strongly that he wants to shake it up. But we’re a long way from having the committees actually move forward to have testimony, to gather information, and so once we get to that point, I think I’ll have a little bit clearer, clearer explanation,” Capito said.
Capito was also asked about Gaetz by television reporter Bob Westfall of WTRF in Wheeling.
“The president elect has a prerogative to appoint the people that he feels will best help him move forward with what he believes — and that I believe too — has been a mandate election for change,” Capito said.
“And the way I look at the the Attorney General’s Office and nominations are that President Trump feels deeply — He talked about this a lot on the campaign trail — that the Department of Justice has been politicized, has been used in political ways to punish some and let others kind of slide through and so Justice has not been fair, and I think he believes that. I’m not surprised that he is appointed a somebody to shake it up the way that he would like to.”
Capito continued by saying the confirmations process is typically lengthy and involved.
“I would remind everybody that the process that we’re going forward on in terms of nominations is a grueling process, and it’s very much a vetting process, and so I expect that we will be doing that over the next probably — beginning in January,” she said.
Capito similarly addressed the Gaetz appointment Wednesday in an interview with Fox host Neil Cavuto, who asked if Trump invited controversy through the appointment.
Capito said Trump was motivated by the federal charges that were leveled against him in a Washington, D.C., case over his alleged participation in attempts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election and a Florida case focused on the alleged mishandling of classified documents at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. Neither went to trial, and they’re being unwound now that Trump is the incoming president.
“I think what we have to look at is the experience that President-elect Trump has had with the Department of Justice,” Capito said to Cavuto.
“He has been prosecuted over and over again on some very flimsy terms and just sort of reworking the wheels of justice to be tilted away from him and I think that’s what he’s reflecting in a pick that is sort of raising eyebrows across the nation in some ways, but I think he still has to go through the process, he still has to be vetted by the Judiciary Committee, and I think that’s going to be the biggest indication as to whether he meets the standards of an attorney general and I think we will move forward on that, but I’m not surprised that the president picked somebody that’s going to shake it up, particularly at the Department of Justice.”