Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Pete Hegseth are sidestepping questions as to whether President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon still thinks women should be allowed in combat roles, following a meeting on Monday in which the senator seemed to shift her tone on the nominee.

Ernst, a military veteran who has met with Hegseth multiple times in recent weeks, said the pair on Monday discussed the issue and called Hegseth “very supportive of women in the military,” when asked if he committed to keeping women in their current roles in the ranks.

But she did not say whether Hegseth had changed his position from a month earlier, when he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast that he was “straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles.”

“It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth said on the podcast, which aired Nov. 7. “We’ve all served with women, and they’re great. But our institutions don’t have........

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