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.
And yet, the Pentagon’s effort isn’t just ongoing, it’s intensifying, even as the Democratic target of this obviously political campaign receives support from his Republican colleagues. Time will tell where this goes — though it’s worth emphasizing that building any kind of credible case against Kelly, who didn’t do anything wrong, would be practically impossible — but the senator’s attorney sent an unsubtle rhetorical shot across the Pentagon’s bow in his correspondence with the Navy secretary. “If the executive branch were to move forward in any forum — criminal, disciplinary, or administrative — we will take all appropriate legal action on Senator Kelly’s behalf to halt the Administration’s unprecedented and dangerous overreach,” the lawyer wrote. 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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