Vice President-elect JD Vance was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to usher Matt Gaetz, one of Donald J. Trump’s most embattled Cabinet picks, to meetings with key senators. It amounts to the highest profile public assignment for Mr. Trump’s heir apparent since the president-elect won the White House earlier this month.
Mr. Vance shepherded Mr. Gaetz, the former representative from Florida who is Mr. Trump’s pick to be the nation’s next attorney general. On Thursday, he’s expected to do the same for Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who is up for secretary of defense. Both men are under fire for past allegations of sexual misconduct.
Even Republican senators have expressed alarm about the selection of Mr. Gaetz, whose resignation from the House last week effectively ended a yearslong investigation by the House Ethics Committee into accusations that he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he met with Mr. Vance and Mr. Gaetz and told them there would be “no rubber stamps, no lynch mobs” in the confirmation process. “These allegations will be dealt with in committee, but he deserves a chance to confront his accusers,” Graham told reporters.
Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is facing allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman, which he has denied. A co-host of a weekend Fox News program, he also faces questions about his ability to serve as the incoming president’s principal adviser on defense policy while leading an agency overseeing 750 military bases worldwide. Mr. Hegseth’s meetings with senators had been scheduled for Wednesday before being pushed back a day.
But Mr. Trump has remained unequivocal about his choices and has assigned his running mate, a senator from Ohio, the task of shepherding them through the initial stages of their confirmation process. That task is not typically carried out by the vice president-elect; usually it is a job for a midlevel official or someone with deep personal relationships on the Hill.
Mr. Vance has maintained a behind-the-scenes role in the two weeks since the election, a departure from the spotlight he commanded as a vice-presidential candidate when he participated in 149 interviews in less than four months on the campaign trail.
That shift, combined with the increasing presence at Mr. Trump’s side of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has raised questions about Mr. Vance’s role in the administration. Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said on MSNBC on Sunday that Mr. Musk had “sandwiched himself between JD Vance and the president — that’s the relationship that is going to play out here in Washington.”
Aides to the president-elect said that Mr. Vance has been in all of the key transition meetings with Mr. Trump, including those with Mr. Musk and Howard Lutnick, the chairman of the transition whom Mr. Trump has selected as his secretary of commerce.
Mr. Vance showed some irritation on Tuesday at questions about his whereabouts when Grace Chong, the chief financial officer for the WarRoom podcast, a pro-Trump program hosted by Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief White House strategist, criticized Mr. Vance on social media for missing votes in the Senate.
Mr. Vance responded by calling Ms. Chong a “mouth breathing imbecile” and saying that he was with Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago helping interview potential administration officials, including the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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