Repeating a vow by President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail, Defense Secretary-nominee Pete Hegseth vowed to bring back U.S. military members who left under President Joe Biden’s COVID mandates to be “reinstituted with pay and rank.”

“We haven’t even talked about COVID and the tens of thousands of service members who were kicked out because of an experimental vaccine,” Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing Tuesday, which aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the free Newsmax2 streaming platform.

“They will be apologized to. They will be reinstituted — reinstituted with pay and rank.”

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