Washington: There has never been a Pentagon spouse quite like Jennifer Hegseth.

In May, she was in camouflage shorts and a sweat-drenched T-shirt that said “This Is War” working out with sailors, Marines and her husband, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, on the deck of the USS Boxer in Singapore.

In June, she and six of the couple’s seven children accompanied her husband to the D-Day commemoration in Normandy, France, where a US Defence Department promotional video with a swelling, cinematic soundtrack captured husband and wife walking arm in arm on Omaha Beach. The imagery seemed to cast her as the first lady of the Pentagon.

Last year, Washington got a different view when she was included in a group Signal chat in which the defence secretary shared attack plans for US warplanes targeting the Houthis in Yemen.

This month, she took on a new role: chair of The President’s Military Spouse Commission, an unpaid position aimed at improving the lives of military families. She stood behind US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office as he announced the initiative.

“This is a big deal today,” she told the president. “We’re super grateful.”

Jennifer Hegseth was for years Pete Hegseth’s producer at Fox News as he built a broadcast career. Now, seven years into their marriage, she is his most influential adviser and his de facto producer at the Pentagon. She has prepped him for appearances, sat in on his meetings with journalists, interviewed potential members of his staff and brainstormed ideas for the Defence Department videos he – and sometimes she – appears in.

Last year, she was in a highly sensitive meeting with her husband and top British defence officials after the United States temporarily stopped sharing military intelligence with Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal first reported. In a previously undisclosed part of that meeting, a Trump administration official told The New York Times, the British indicated that they had officers on the ground in Ukraine and that without the US intelligence, including early warnings of incoming missiles from Russia, the officers’ lives were at risk.

The British spoke in general terms, the official said, because the presence of Jennifer Hegseth made them uneasy. Later they had a smaller meeting, without her, to go into detail.

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on Tuesday that Jennifer Hegseth was only in the meeting for introductions, left soon after and has not been present for any Defence Department conversation or meeting where classified information was discussed.

Jennifer Hegseth has also encouraged her husband’s adversarial relationship with the news media, the administration official said, and although she was a journalist for two decades, she has worked with her husband to bar reporters from the building. (The Times is suing the Defence Department over its restrictions on reporters who cover the Pentagon.)

Her involvement in the Defence Department is so unusual that it has led to questions about Pete Hegseth’s leadership. He is already under pressure for the high cost of the Iran war, shrinking munitions stockpiles, poor conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during an 8½-month deployment in the Middle East, firings of senior military leaders, and blocking the promotions of women and minorities.

“It’s bonkers that a defence secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” said John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesperson after three months working under Pete Hegseth and has been critical of his leadership. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”

“This is not normal,” Senator Chris Coons, a senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said last year on MSNBC during the uproar over Jennifer Hegseth’s inclusion in the chat and high-level meetings. “Secretary Hegseth has one of the highest levels of classification access. He can’t just hand that to his wife and say, ‘Here, honey, hold my beer, and hold my classified information’.”

Jennifer Hegseth declined to be interviewed for this article, which is based on interviews with 20 current and former administration officials and people who know her in other capacities. Most declined to be named for fear of reprisal.

In a statement, Parnell called Jennifer Hegseth “an accomplished leader in her own right and a devoted military spouse” who “is a vital asset and a true force multiplier for our mission”. The Defence Department, he said, “not only welcomes her current leadership but actively plans to involve her even more deeply in the future”.

The Pentagon has not said if Jennifer Hegseth has a security clearance, although in the past year there have been no reports that she is attending sensitive meetings with foreign leaders. She has still slipped quietly into the Pentagon, including using an elevator from the building’s garage that opens directly into her husband’s office suite. She is in direct contact with members of her husband’s inner circle, among them Ricky Buria, Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff, and Tami Radabaugh, a close friend of Jennifer Hegseth and a fellow former producer at Fox News.

Radabaugh has become a senior adviser to Pete Hegseth for communications strategy and is considered Jennifer Hegseth’s eyes and ears at the Pentagon. She did not respond to a request for comment.

One person familiar with Pete Hegseth’s thinking said the defence secretary liked his wife to travel with him to keep him out of trouble. Hegseth, who has a history of heavy drinking, has made clear that he needs his wife at his side. He often credits his “two J’s” – Jennifer and Jesus – with transforming his life.

“My Jenny, my wife, Jennifer, changed my life, saved me, there’s just no doubt about it,” he told Megyn Kelly on her podcast in December 2024, weeks before his confirmation hearing. “And without those two J’s, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

A tea and a garden party

There is one Hegseth family rule. “Oh, it’s just obey God,” Jennifer Hegseth said.

It was a December podcast recording with Katie Miller, a veteran adviser from Trump’s first term and the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s most powerful policy aide.

Jennifer Hegseth and her husband were seated on a small sofa at the Pentagon, knees touching, with an American flag hanging behind her shoulder. She was in jeans, a black sweater and high heels. He was in a dress shirt with sleeves rolled up to show his tattoos.

Jennifer Hegseth frequently squeezed her husband’s arm and interlaced her fingers with his when he put his hand on her knee. At times, they finished each other’s sentences.

She homeschools her children, she told Katie Miller, in accordance with a conservative Christian curriculum at the family’s home in Washington, called Quarters 8, a 20-room, white-columned Colonial Revival house. It was built by Gilded Age architectural firm McKim, Mead & White on a channel parallel to the Potomac River on the Fort McNair military base.

“I watch her the night before at the whiteboard in our dining room, which is now a converted schoolhouse, and she’s erasing Thursday and writing Friday, and ‘Here’s the tasks we’ve got for the day’,” Pete Hegseth said in the interview. “It’s really been a blessing to watch her embrace that role.”

On many Sundays, she attends services with her family and a security detail at Christ Church Washington, DC. Located in a meeting space on Capitol Hill owned by the Conservative Partnership Institute, the church is part of the Community of Reformed Evangelical Churches whose leaders believe that the United States should be a Christian nation and that people should vote by casting one vote per household, typically led by a man.

“If they’re in town, they’re usually in attendance,” said Joe Rigney, a pastor and a leader of the church network who delivered a sermon at the church on a hot July day. Even though the Hegseths were out of the city, there was a large police presence keeping a handful of protesters away from the building.

Publicly, Jennifer Hegseth has embraced the life of a more traditional official Washington spouse. In May, she was the host of a Pentagon garden party in honour of military mothers. In February, she was at Fort Campbell, reading a book to children at the Defence Department school there. Last December, she hosted Gold Star families – relatives of service members killed in war or on active duty – for a Christmas tea at the Pentagon.

She told Trump during the announcement of the spouse commission that her meetings with military families from Fort Campbell to Singapore had made her aware of the problems they face. “It’s housing, it’s healthcare, it’s employment, it’s childcare, it’s education,” she said.

On weekends, Jennifer Hegseth is often on the couple’s 77-acre, $3.4 million farm outside Nashville, Tennessee, where photos on her Instagram feed have captured her children riding horses and Pete Hegseth holding a dead raccoon that killed four family hens. The Hegseths are not regulars on Washington’s party circuit.

“Her family is her life,” Katie Miller, a good friend of Jennifer Hegseth, said in an interview. “So many people in DC are transient or looking over the person they’re talking to or looking for the next-person conversation, or only talk with the important spouse. She’s one of the rare people who when we get together, it just feels very normal.”

** ‘Glory to God’ **

Jennifer Hegseth, 49, is a daughter of a Lockheed Martin executive whose work took the family from Maitland, Florida, to Hunt Valley, Maryland, a suburb north of Baltimore. She majored in journalism at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, and in 2001 landed a job as a producer at WPIX in New York. In 2006, she began an 18-year career at Fox News as an executive producer on Fox & Friends, the cable network’s marquee morning show.

Numerous colleagues there described her as a talented workhorse – smart, organised, driven – with the stamina to thrive in the brutal early morning hours of the 6am to 9am program. She also had a good eye for selecting what several called the “red meat” stories that appealed to Fox News viewers. In 2010, she married Dennis Rauchet, a New York real estate developer, and had three children with him.

Pete Hegseth, a Princeton graduate and a decorated veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, arrived at Fox News as an on-air contributor in 2014. He was soon a rising star, although he had episodes of heavy drinking that company officials or co-workers had to address. An early marriage had ended in 2009, and he married his second wife in 2010. The couple had three children.

(Pete Hegseth has said he never had a drinking problem. When Will Cain, a Fox News colleague of Hegseth’s, asked him on a 2021 podcast if he drank heavily after serving in Iraq, Hegseth replied, “Oh, yeah”. He vowed he wouldn’t drink at all as secretary of defence.)

By 2016, when Pete Hegseth was regularly co-hosting Fox & Friends Weekend, he and Jennifer were having an affair. The relationship burst into the open at the Fox & Friends Christmas party that year, when Jennifer’s husband turned up, even though the event was limited to Fox employees. Hegseth, who had been drinking, was upset to see him and caused a disturbance that the human resources department had to address with him, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

Timothy Parlatore, Pete Hegseth’s former personal lawyer and now his special adviser at the Pentagon, has said the Christmas party episode is not true.

Fox News moved Jennifer in January 2017 to be executive producer of Watters’ World, then on Saturday nights. In June of that year, she and her first husband were divorced. In August, she gave birth to a daughter with Pete Hegseth, Gwendolyn Hope.

In September, Pete Hegseth’s second wife filed for divorce. In October, he was accused of raping a woman at a speaking event in California. Charges were never filed, and Hegseth has said the accusation was false. But he said he paid the woman $US50,000 ($70,000) as part of a settlement to protect his family and his job at Fox News. Jennifer Hegseth has never commented publicly on the matter.

After this chain of events, Pete Hegseth began what he has described as a religious transformation. In 2018, the Hegseths joined Colts Neck Community Church in New Jersey, where they were living at the time. The evangelical church is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and Pete Hegseth, who grew up attending Sunday services at a Baptist church in Minnesota, said his wife at first showed some reluctance.

She was “wary of what evangelical Baptists were like”, Pete Hegseth told the magazine Nashville Christian Family. But “within 20 minutes”, he added, “we felt at home”.

People who worked with Jennifer Hegseth at Fox News do not recall her talking openly about faith – her father’s 2009 funeral had been at a Methodist church – but she became a partner on her husband’s journey. After the two were married in August 2019 at the Trump National Golf Club in Colts Neck, her Instagram feed became noticeably more religious.

“Glory to God!” she wrote in a June 2022 post when Battle for the American Mind, a book Pete Hegseth wrote with David Goodwin, a pioneer in conservative Christian education, landed at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

By then, Jennifer Hegseth was vice president of Fox Nation, a Fox News subscription streaming service, as well as the executive producer of The Miseducation of America, a documentary show that streamed for two seasons on Fox Nation. It starred Pete Hegseth assailing what he called the liberal takeover of American schools.

**‘She’s got a rhythm’ **

Jennifer Hegseth had never lived or worked in Washington when she arrived with her husband in December 2024, shortly after she left Fox Nation. She immediately shattered what was expected of a political spouse by accompanying her husband to meetings with startled Republican senators before his confirmation hearings.

“It was unusual,” Pete Hegseth acknowledged to Katie Miller on her podcast. “I remember the first meeting we went to that she came with, I was like, ‘huh’. And then it felt so right and so natural.”

In those early days, Jennifer Hegseth also interviewed potential staff members for jobs at the Pentagon. Ullyot, who was in line for Pentagon spokesperson, said he remembered getting a call that Jennifer Hegseth would like to see him. He expected it to be a pleasant meet-and-greet. But when he got to the offices at the Republican National Committee that Pete Hegseth used for a time during the transition, he said, Jennifer Hegseth asked him in a one-on-one interview “unexpectedly detailed and hard-edged questions” for some 40 minutes, including how he would handle a hostile news media.

Once Pete Hegseth was in office, Jennifer Hegseth was eager to revoke the credentials of Pentagon reporters who she felt had written negative stories about her husband, the administration official and a former administration official said.

After Pete Hegseth was told he could run into legal problems by singling out individual reporters, Ullyot said, the Pentagon announced in February a new “annual media rotation program” that removed the Times, NBC News, NPR and Politico from their workspaces in the building and swapped in The New York Post, Breitbart News, One America News and HuffPost. (Since then, officials have moved all reporters to an annex outside the building for what they say are workspace renovations.)

In the year and a half since, Katie Miller said in the interview, Jennifer Hegseth has settled into Washington. “She’s got a rhythm, she’s got a routine,” she said. “They’ve got a good thing going.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.