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.”








