Trump news live: President-elect's team responds to sordid police report on Cabinet pick Pete Hegseth

Donald Trump stunned Washington by plucking celebrities and prominent figures from cable television to fill his Cabinet and administration.

In doing so, he ignored more traditional candidates favored by the political establishment.

To say his picks rattled the capital would be an understatement. Some of them have more credentials on IMDb than they do years of government service.

The choices were perhaps not surprising given Trump's history as a New York businessman who became a star of the television show The Apprentice. And he has long expressed admiration for those who look like they are from Hollywood 'central casting'.

However, Trump's break from the status quo is an important change from his first administration, when he picked many establishment candidates to fill major government roles.

This time, he watched TV clips of potential Cabinet members on monitors in a makeshift 'situation room' at Mar-a-Lago.

It appears to have been very important to him that those he chose are able to represent the administration well in live TV interviews, and are able to disrupt business as usual in Washington.

The woman who accused Pete Hegseth of sexual assault claims something may have been slipped in her drink before he took her phone and physically blocked her from leaving his room, according to a police report.

Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guard officer who was recently nominated by Donald Trump to be secretary of defense, was investigated for the alleged sexual assault in 2017 but no charges were filed.

The report, released by the city of Monterey, California, details an allegedly 'very drunk' Hegseth groping multiple woman at a hotel in the early morning hours of October 8, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa.

The alleged victim, then 30 years old, who asked to be referred to as Jane Doe, was having champagne with co-workers while on a business trip when things got 'fuzzy' and she suddenly ended up in a room with Hegseth.

Jill Biden's teacher union on Wednesday slammed Donald Trump's decision to nominate Linda McMahon as Education secretary, calling her 'Betsy DeVos 2.0.'

McMahon is expected to undo all of the Biden administration's initiatives when she takes over the U.S. Department of Education - which Trump has said he would like to do away with altogether - including narrowing its support of transgender athletes.

The former CEO of the WWE was a controversial choice on Trump's part. Her experience is on the executive end – in the first Trump administration she headed the Small Business Association – and she has little experience with education.

The National Education Association, the union which the first lady belongs to as a community college professor, slammed McMahon's appointment. It is the nation's largest teachers union.

NEA President Becky Pringle said McMahon would be a new version of DeVos.

Nikki Haley blasted President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

She accused the former Democratic congresswoman turned Trump supporter of spreading Russian propaganda and called her a 'Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.'

The former South Carolina GOP governor gave her scathing review of the 78-year-old president-elect's nominations for his Cabinet on her SiriusXM radio show 'Nikki Haley Live.'

'Everybody now loves that she is saying she's now a Republican, but I have always said "let's look at what they've said, what their actions are,"' Haley said of Gabbard.

Haley slammed the controversial nominee for going to Syria in 2017 to meet with dictator Bashar al-Assad for what Haley called a 'photo op' while he carried out atrocities against his own people.

Haley called it disgusting that Gabbard would question if it was the Syrian leader who was behind the chemical attacks in his country. She recalled giving a speech at the United Nations during Trump's first term about the attacks on children.

The hosts of Morning Joe held their secret meeting with Donald Trump over fears the president-elect would allow Matt Gaetz to lead a probe into conspiracy theories surrounding the 2001 death of Joe Scarborough's intern.

Scarborough and his co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski have faced a deluge of backlash after they revealed the Mar-a-Lago summit amid declining viewership on their beleaguered network.

Some called the recent Trump meeting a feeble attempt to bring in conservative viewers.

But the pair are reportedly 'petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern.'

'That's what this was about,' a source told Puck about the motive. 'It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It's all about fear of retribution and investigation,'

Since 2020, Trump has spread theories that Scarborough had an affair with intern Lori Klausutis and was responsible for her death.