General Discussion

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?”