An attorney representing Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona sent a letter to Secretary of the Navy John Phelan this week that condemned an ongoing Pentagon investigation into the senator in no uncertain terms.
“To be clear: there is no legitimate basis for any type of proceeding against Senator Kelly, and any such effort would be unconstitutional and an extraordinary abuse of power,” the letter read.
At about the same time, the Defense Department said it’s advancing its probe into Kelly anyway. The Washington Post reported:
The Pentagon said Monday night that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is ‘escalating’ his review of Sen. Mark Kelly’s involvement in a video he and other Democratic lawmakers made reminding service members of their duty to disobey illegal orders — an unprecedented use of the military justice system to investigate a political adversary.
In a statement, the Defense Department said it was elevating what had been a ‘review’ to an ‘official Command Investigation’ to be carried out at least in part by the Pentagon general counsel’s office.
If anyone needs a refresher, it was almost a week after several Democratic military veterans urged service members to reject illegal orders when Hegseth announced an investigation into Kelly, a decorated Navy veteran. The Arizona Democrat is the only member of the group who retired as a captain and served long enough to receive a military pension.
As a result, the senator is not only still required to follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but he can also be punished in a variety of ways: The Pentagon could lower his rank, target his pension or, as Hegseth emphasized a few weeks ago, recall Kelly to active service in order to face a court-martial.
The problem, of course, is that any such efforts to punish Kelly would be ridiculous under the circumstances. All the senator did was remind service members to follow the law and the UCMJ, echoing comments Hegseth himself made before he joined Donald Trump’s Cabinet.








