During a recent interview with the far-Left Daily Beast, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), one of six Democratic lawmakers who collaborated on the infamous video telling service members they have a duty to refuse “unlawful orders,” made an extraordinary claim. She said they felt compelled to act because:
There [were] so many people coming to us, who were on active duty who — recent veterans, family members of service members — who were coming to us individually and saying two things: One, ‘I’m concerned I’m going to sent in uniform to an American city, you know, like L.A., Chicago, Memphis, and I’m going to be asked to do things I either don’t think are legal or I’m not trained for. What do I do?And then, this fall, it really turned and it became a lot of people who were involved in the operations, um, around the Caribbean asking those same things. ‘Hey, I’m not sure — I don’t know if this is legal. I don’t know if I’d be held accountable later after this administration. I can’t get a straight answer about whether this is legal or not. What do you think we should do?’So we were hearing that. There was a lot of juju in the system on that for months. And that’s why we made the video, just restating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
It is remarkable that, after three full weeks of scrambling to defend that misguided, unprecedented video, the best Slotkin could offer was anonymous sources.
Given that Democrats — and much of the legacy media — frequently base their most sensational claims on anonymous sourcing, I’m sure this explanation will play just fine with the party’s base.
It more than satisfied The Daily Beast, whose headline for the segment blared, Why Troops Are Blowing Whistle on Trump: Senator. The outlet reported, “military personnel have expressed anguish to her over carrying out questionable orders since then.”
For many of us, though, it’s far too flimsy an excuse for what we’ve already interpreted as a seditious act — merely the latest move in what is plainly the Democrats’ broader, calculated effort to undermine the Trump administration. [They are almost certainly doing the same thing with the rest of the bureaucracy just not as publicly.]
Her latest remarks also contradict her first public comments following the video’s release.
If any of the six members of Congress genuinely believed the Trump administration’s drug-boat strikes were illegal, they had legitimate avenues for raising those concerns. As John Lucas — a veteran who has served as both an Army Ranger and a Special Forces Green Beret — explained on his Substack blog, there were several more “honorable alternatives” they could have pursued.
If the Gang of 6 were honestly concerned about the troops’ welfare and thought that they needed a reminder about the laws of armed conflict and unlawful or lawful orders, these professed public servants had a viable and proper alternative. They could have approached the Judge Advocate Generals for each military service, and requested, in a non-partisan way, that they take appropriate steps to ensure that the subject of was being adequately addressed in both initial and ongoing training for all service members. They could have had a candid conversation that avoided creating the turmoil that has been caused – likely intentionally – by their video that has now been seen by millions of viewers.But they forsook any chance of such a candid and potentially productive exchange with their glory-seeking video that comes perilously close to the line of attempting to instigate a mutiny.
But these Democrats, who truly couldn’t care less about the lives (or deaths) of the crew members transporting drugs to the U.S., chose a different path — one far more disingenuous and dangerous. And Lucas laid this out clearly in his essay.
It is an effort to create plausible deniability as a misleading subterfuge. Their slick video production is not an innocent civics lesson for ignorant troops who somehow need additional instruction in military law. It is, in fact, an effort to undermine the President, to encourage disobedience of his orders, to sow chaos in the ranks, and to promote continued lawfare and turmoil in the military, all of which is intended to hamstring this President because they disagree with his policies.
Sorry senator, nice try, but few Americans are buying your latest lies.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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