In mid-December, the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was “escalating” his crusade against Sen. Mark Kelly, launching an “official Command Investigation” into the Arizona Democrat. It was, as The Washington Post noted soon after, “an unprecedented use of the military justice system to investigate a political adversary.”
Three weeks later, the beleaguered Cabinet secretary, who presumably has more important matters on his plate, took the next step down a radical path. My MS NOW colleague Erum Salam reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Monday that he plans to demote the military rank of Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona after the retired Navy captain reminded those actively serving to disobey illegal orders. […]
Hegseth said he issued a ‘letter of censure’ to Kelly, calling it a first step toward a demotion and a decrease in pension. Censure is a formal disciplinary action, sometimes punitive, that can only be issued by someone in a service member’s chain of command. If successful, it can result in demotion of a service member’s rank and a reduction in their retirement pay.
For those who might have lost sight of the transgression that prompted the secretary’s crusade: Several Democratic military veterans appeared in a video, released in November, in which they urged service members to reject illegal orders. A week later, 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.)
The campaign against Kelly is awfully tough to defend: All the senator and his colleagues did was to remind service members to follow the law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, echoing comments Hegseth himself made before he joined Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
On the surface, this might appear to be the latest in a series of steps on the White House’s so-called revenge tour, but this particular partisan fight is a bit more complex.
It’s not just about Kelly: As the senator said on “The Rachel Maddow Show” hours after Hegseth’s announcement, the defense secretary is taking steps “to try to silence me, silence other members of Congress, silence retired members of the military, former service members, really silence the American people. I mean, this isn’t only about me; this is about all of us.”
It’s an important detail: By targeting a senator who urged military personnel to follow the law, Hegseth is sending a signal to service members everywhere — retired and active duty — that they too could be targeted if they speak out in ways Team Trump doesn’t like.
What happened to the court-martial? Hegseth emphasized several weeks ago that the Pentagon might recall Kelly to active service in order to face a court martial. The secretary has since backed away from this gambit for the most obvious of reasons: He surely knows that the court-martial process would bring this matter to a jury, which would recognize the political crusade as a baseless sham.
The Pentagon chief appears to prefer a process that he can control and that can lead to punitive outcomes he can dictate.
Blurry partisan lines: As Hegseth’s campaign against Kelly advanced in the fall, the Democratic senator received some unexpected support from some of his Republican colleagues. This week, that continued: Two GOP senators — Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — separately criticized Hegseth’s latest moves on Monday, with Tillis going so far as to characterize the defense secretary’s announcement as “ridiculous.”
Kelly’s pushback: If Trump’s Pentagon expects Kelly to back down in the face of absurd bullying, that’s apparently not going to happen. “Here’s the thing, Rachel: I’m never going to back down from these guys,” the senator said Monday on MS NOW. “I’m going to continue to speak out. I’m going to continue to do my job and, as much as I can, highlight how wrong these people are and how outrageous this is and how dangerous.” Will the crusade backfire? As Kelly weighs his future political and electoral options, the Pentagon chief is making him more popular, more visible and, as of this week, more eager to use his mailing list for a fresh round of fundraising. Whether Hegseth realizes this or not, his target might very well end up benefiting from the secretary’s offensive. Endgame: As part of the existing process, Kelly has 30 days to respond formally to Hegseth’s letter, but just as notably, assuming his demotion happens, the senator will have the option of taking the matter to the courts, to the Board for Correction of Naval Records or to both. “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,” Kelly’s lawyer wrote in a letter to Secretary of the Navy John Phelan in December. Watch this space. 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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