Trump’s Choice to Lead Pentagon Withdraws Amid Reports of Violent Family Turmoil

Patrick Shanahan will be replaced by a former Raytheon lobbyist.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Patrick Shanahan, President Donald Trump’s acting secretary of Defense, withdrew himself from the nomination process for the permanent job Tuesday—a decision that coincided with media reports about alleged domestic violence incidents involving his ex-wife and son. Trump announced the move on Twitter and said Shanahan would “devote more time to his family.”

The announcement came shortly before the Washington Post reported on an incident from November of 2011 involving Shanahan’s then 17-year-old son and Shanahan’s ex-wife, Kimberley Shanahan (now Kimberley Jordinson). According to the Post, the couple’s son, William Shanahan, severely beat his mother with a baseball bat. In the weeks after the assault, Shanahan defended his son’s action in a memo sent to his ex-wife’s brother, calling it self-defense. From the Post:

“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.”

Shanahan, who served as deputy Defense secretary under James Mattis and previously spent more than three decades at Boeing, told the Post in an interview that he regrets what he wrote:

“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.

“Quite frankly it’s difficult to relive that moment and the passage was difficult for me to read. I was wrong to write those three sentences,” Shanahan said.

Earlier Tuesday, USA Today reported that the FBI has been examining a domestic violence dispute between Shanahan and his ex-wife from August of 2010, in which “both claimed to the police that they had been punched by the other.” According to the paper:

Both Shanahan and Jordinson acknowledged in court filings and police reports that a late-night argument on Aug. 28, 2010, after both had been drinking, spilled from their bedroom to the front yard of their Seattle home. The incident escalated into a clash that police said left him with a bloodied nose and hand and her with a blood-stained forearm. But their accounts diverged on who was to blame, as well as the claim Jordinson reported to officers and later outlined in divorce papers: that Shanahan punched her in the stomach.

Shanahan denied hitting her and told police that she was the aggressor and that she had punched him “10 to 20 times,” according to police records obtained by USA TODAY. Officers—noting in part that Jordinson’s bloody forearm appeared consistent with her having attacked her husband—arrested Jordinson on suspicion of domestic violence. Prosecutors later dropped the charge, citing a lack of evidence…“Though my marriage ended in sorrow and disappointment, I never laid a hand on my then-wife and cooperated fully in a thorough law enforcement investigation that resulted in her being charged with assault against me,” Shanahan said in a prepared statement late Monday.

Despite announcing last month that he would choose Shanahan to permanently lead the Defense Department, Trump had yet to formally make the nomination, leading Senate aides to speculate that the delay might be related to a hold-up in Shanahan’s FBI background check. “We’ve discussed the possibility of something like this popping,” a staffer for one Senate Armed Services Committee member said. A spokesperson for Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the committee, told USA Today the senator was not aware of the incidents in Shanahan’s past. Shanahan told CNN last week that he had “no concerns” about his background check.

“I believe my continuing in the confirmation process would force my three children to relive a traumatic chapter in our family’s life and reopen wounds we have worked years to heal,” Shanahan said in the statement released after the announcement of his withdrawal. “Ultimately, their safety and well-being is my highest priority. I would welcome the opportunity to be Secretary of Defense, but not at the expense of being a good father.”

On Twitter, Trump announced that he’s naming Mark Esper, the civilian leader of the Army and a former Raytheon lobbyist, to be the new acting secretary of Defense.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate