As a Fox News personality, Pete Hegseth repeatedly stressed that U.S. service members were duty-bound to resist unlawful orders from a potential President Donald Trump.
Now serving as Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Hegseth is railing against Democratic members of Congress and threatening to haul at least one sitting senator into military tribunals for delivering a similar message.
And before serving as Trump’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Pam Bondi also similarly argued that military officers must disobey unlawful orders.
Their statements stand in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s threats to members of Congress who warned American troops against following “illegal orders” as the defense secretary faces growing legal scrutiny from international groups and both Democratic and Republican members of Congress for his alleged commands to leave no survivors behind in a lethal campaign against suspected drug traffickers.
Those lawmakers, all of whom have military or intelligence backgrounds, are now facing questioning by the FBI and Department of Justice.
In 2016, then-candidate Trump faced widespread criticism for his suggestion that the U.S. military should revive banned forms of torture and “take out” families of suspected terrorists, which legal experts and former officials argued would be a war crime.
“I got some response from vets saying that, no, you’re not just gonna follow that order, if it’s unlawful,” Hegseth said during a March 2016 appearance on Fox & Friends.
“The military’s not gonna follow illegal orders,” Hegseth said during an appearance on Fox Business that month.
The resurfaced clips uncovered by CNN’s KFile follow the Trump administration’s threatening messages to six members of Congress who warned military personnel against “threats to our Constitution” coming “from right here at home.”
A video from the lawmakers last month urged troops to ignore “illegal orders” and commit to their oath to the Constitution but did not point to any specific actions they believed were unlawful. But the statement follows a wave of National Guard deployments into American cities and the extrajudicial killings of more than 80 alleged drug smugglers on boats in Pacific and Caribbean waters.
In response, Hegseth threatened to recall Senator Mark Kelly back to active duty to face court-martial proceedings. The FBI also is questioning lawmakers about their remarks, while Trump has called them “traitors” who “SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW” and raged against them in a series of Truth Social statements in the days that followed their video.
“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!,” he wrote.
Trump also reposted several messages from Truth Social users, including a message demanding the president “HANG THEM” like “GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
But in his Fox remarks and other appearances before the former Army National Guard officer was tapped to lead the sprawling defense department managing the nation’s armed forces and more than 3 million personnel, Hegseth stressed that no service member would ever follow unlawful orders from the president.
“Here’s the problem with Trump,” Hegseth said in an appearance on then-Fox personality Megyn Kelly’s show in March 2016.
“He says, ‘Go ahead and kill the family. Go ahead and torture. Go ahead and go further than waterboarding,’” he said. “What happens when people follow those orders, or don’t follow them? It’s not clear that Donald Trump will have their back.”
Trump is “oftentimes about Donald Trump,” Hegseth said.
“If you’re not changing the law and you’re just saying it, you create even more ambiguity,” he added.
In response to questions about the resurfaced statements, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CNN that “the military already has clear procedures for handling unlawful orders, but seditious Democrats injected ambiguity and failed to provide a single example because all of President Trump’s actions have been lawful.”
“Instead, these lawmakers sowed doubt in a clear chain of command, which is reckless, dangerous, and deeply irresponsible for an elected official,” she added.
In a brief to the Supreme Court last year supporting Trump’s push for sweeping “immunity” from criminal prosecution, Bondi sought to address a statement from one of then-candidate Trump’s attorneys who had argued that Trump, as president, should not be subject to criminal prosecution for ordering the assassination of a political rival.
Bondi, seeking to rein in the statement, stated that 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,” she wrote.
“A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival, and the members of the military are required not to carry out such an unlawful order,” she added. “It would be a crime to do so.”
Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who joined five other lawmakers in the video statement, said the president’s reaction and the use of the FBI against them “is exactly why we made the video.”
“He believes in using the federal government against his perceived adversaries, and he’s not afraid to use the arms of the government against people he disagrees with. He does not believe the law applies to him,” she said in a statement.
Trump is “using the FBI as a tool to intimidate and harass members of Congress,” according to a joint statement from Reps. Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander and Chrissy Houlahan, who joined last week’s video message.
“No amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution,” they said in a joint statement. “We swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. We will not be bullied. We will never give up the ship.”
