Acting defense secretary quits
Patrick Shanahan withdrew from consideration to be confirmed as Pentagon chief for family reasons.
WASHINGTON — Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan withdrew from consideration to be confirmed as Pentagon chief on Tuesday, President Donald Trump said, plunging the Department of Defense into a leadership upheaval for the second time in six months.
In a message on Twitter, Trump said that Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who has led the Pentagon on an acting basis since early this year, had “decided not to go forward with his confirmation process so that he can devote more time to his family.”
Trump thanked Shanahan for his “outstanding service” and said that Mark Esper, another former defense industry executive who now serves as Army secretary, would be the new acting defense secretary.
After a nomination process that had been delayed by an unusually lengthy FBI background check, the decision upends what was expected to be an imminent confirmation hearing for Shanahan, injecting a new element of uncertainty into the Pentagon’s highest levels at a moment when the military is scrambling to maintain its technological edge over China and fears are mounting about a potential conflict with Iran.
Shanahan pulled himself out of the running as media organizations including The Washington Post published reports shedding light for the first time on details of Shanahan’s contentious divorce, including a 2010 domestic abuse allegation and his role in an incident in which his son attacked his ex-wife with a baseball bat.
In a statement, Shanahan said it was “unfortunate that a painful and deeply personal family situation from long ago is being dredged up and painted in an incomplete and therefore misleading way in the course of this process.”
Shanahan said he had decided “after significant reflection” to remove himself from the confirmation process and resign. “I would welcome the opportunity to be secretary of defense, but not at the expense of being a good father,” he said.
In the months that he served as acting secretary of defense, Shanahan worked to keep domestic violence incidents within his family private.
Court records show that his ex-wife, Kimberly, was arrested several times on charges that included burglary, property damage and assault. The assault charge was a misdemeanor for domestic violence in August 2010 when, according to police records, she hit Shanahan a number of times, giving him a bloody nose and black eye. The police report said she was not injured, and he was not charged.
Shanahan spoke publicly about the incidents in interviews with The Washington Post on Monday and Tuesday.
“Bad things can happen to good families … and this is a tragedy, really,” Shanahan said. Dredging up the episode publicly, he said, “will ruin my son’s life.”
In November 2011, Shanahan rushed to defend his then 17-year-old son, William Shanahan, in the days after the teenager brutally beat his mother. The attack had left Shanahan’s ex-wife unconscious in a pool of blood, her skull fractured and with internal injuries that required surgery, according to court and police records.
Two weeks later, Shanahan sent his ex-wife’s brother a memo arguing that his son had acted in self-defense.
“Use of a baseball bat in self-defense will likely be viewed as an imbalance of force,” Shanahan wrote. “However, Will’s mother harassed him for nearly three hours before the incident.”
In an hourlong interview Monday night at his apartment in Virginia, Shanahan, who has been responding to questions from The Washington Post about the incidents since January, said he wrote the memo in the hours after his son’s attack, before he knew the full extent of his ex-wife’s injuries. He said it was to prepare for his son’s initial court appearance and that he never intended for anyone other than his son’s attorneys to read it.
“That document literally was, I sat down with (my son) right away, and being an engineer at an aerospace company, you write down what are all of the mitigating reasons something could have happened. You know, just what’s the list of things that could have happened?”
As he later wrote in the divorce case, Shanahan said Monday that he does not believe there can be any justification for an assault with a baseball bat, but he went further in the interview, saying he now regrets writing the passage.
In his statement, Shanahan said he asked to be withdrawn from the nomination process and he resigned from his previous post as deputy defense secretary. He said he would work on an “appropriate transition” but it wasn’t clear how quickly he will leave the job.