Three weeks ago, several Democratic military veterans serving in Congress released a video to remind service members that they have a responsibility to reject illegal orders. Despite the legal accuracy of the message, the White House launched a furious retaliation campaign that was extreme, even by contemporary standards.
Donald Trump helped lead the charge, insisting that the Democratic lawmakers, who’d done nothing wrong, had engaged in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
Though the story is no longer dominating headlines, the president has not given up on trying to use the levers of federal power, on multiple fronts, to target the Democratic veterans who appeared in the video. Last week, there was even a report about Trump-appointed FBI leaders “pressuring the bureau’s domestic terrorism agents to open a seditious conspiracy investigation” into the Democrats who urged service members to follow the law.
Time will tell what, if anything, comes of the White House’s crusade, but if there are going to be investigations into political leaders who’ve said publicly that service members must reject illegal orders, administration officials should probably start preparing to scrutinize some of their own.
CNN reported last week, for example, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who’s helped advance the partisan offensive against the Democratic veterans, delivered remarks in 2016 explaining that U.S. military personnel “won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief” and described the refusal of illegal commands as a part of the military’s ethos and standards.
CNN also found that, as Election Day 2016 drew closer, the former Fox News host told viewers that service members are “not going to follow illegal orders.”
That is to say, eight years ago, the future Pentagon chief delivered the same message he and Trump are now condemning.
Evidently, Hegseth is not alone. The New York Times reported: Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said the same thing as the [Democratic] lawmakers last year in a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court as a lawyer for the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that represented three former military leaders. In the legal brief, which is available online through the high court’s website, Bondi wrote, “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders.” The Florida Republican added, “The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill nonmilitary targets. Indeed, service members are required not to do so.” I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Trump administration won’t launch sedition investigations into the incumbent president’s defense secretary and attorney general, but if officials continue to pursue Democratic veterans in Congress, they should probably prepare an answer to a straightforward question: “Why aren’t you also pursuing cases against the president’s defense secretary and attorney general?” This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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