Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a veritable wind-up doll of ill-conceived ideas, and his latest is a doozy: What if he figured out a new way to attack Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona?
Hegseth is obsessed with punishing Kelly for speaking out about Hegseth’s actions. This is ceaselessly stupid, illegal, and ridiculous—even more so because Hegseth is in the middle of a war that is very much not going well. Doesn’t he have better things to do?
On Sunday, Kelly appeared on “Face the Nation” where he dared to talk about how Pete’s Iran Adventure isn’t going well at all, what with how it’s draining the nation’s stockpile of weapons with no end in sight.
Attribution: APDemocratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona
“We’ve been briefed by the Pentagon on specific munitions,” Kelly said. “I think it’s fair to say it’s shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines, because this president got our country into this without a strategic goal, without a plan, without a timeline, and because of that, we’ve expended a lot of munitions, and that means the American people are less safe.”
He even called out Hegseth himself, saying, “You may have seen me ask the Secretary of Defense this question about how long it’s going to take to replenish. We’re talking about years.”
It isn’t a secret that the administration is burning through munitions in Iran at a staggering rate. In late April, multiple outlets reported that the war in Iran was depleting U.S. weaponry.
Hegseth’s response to this was totally cool and normal, of course, showing great restraint and professionalism.
Lol, just kidding.
Hegseth raced to X to drop a sneering post about how Kelly was “blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a *CLASSIFIED* Pentagon briefing he received,” and that the Defense Department’s “legal counsel will review” whether Kelly violated his oath.
Pete, buddy. We all know you don’t really have object permanence, nor the capacity to remember anything from one moment to the next, but this one is going to be kinda hard to pull off.
As Kelly pointed out when replying to Hegseth’s little threat, Kelly asked Hegseth in a public hearing on April 30 how long it would take to rebuild our stockpile of munitions, and Hegseth jumped at the opportunity to say that the military needed more money to make more weapons.
“I think that’s exactly the right question, too, Senator. Because the time frame we were existing under was unacceptable. And what this budget does, I mean, months and years. I mean, we’re building new plants in real time,” Hegseth said at the time.
Related | Hegseth gets petty with move to demote Mark Kelly
Even if Kelly revealed classified information that he received from the Pentagon during a briefing, that would be an issue related to Kelly’s role as a senator. But it isn’t at all clear—except maybe in the swill that makes up Hegseth’s brain—how this would constitute a violation of Kelly’s military oath.
Still, Hegseth is so hell-bent on punishing Kelly that he reportedly pushed out former Navy Secretary John Phelan for refusing to ignore a judge’s order that thwarted Hegseth’s previous nonsense attack on Kelly. Remember that one? That’s when the administration cooked up the idea that Kelly telling soldiers to refuse illegal orders was a treasonous crime.
Attribution: Clay Bennett/Tribune Content AgencyA cartoon by Clay Bennett.
Surely it’s just a coincidence that Hegseth floated a different theory as to why Kelly should be punished just a couple days after a federal appeals court made it pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to overturn the lower court’s order.
Things did not go well at all at oral arguments, with one judge pointing out to the Justice Department attorney foolish enough to defend this, “You are saying that they have to give up their retired status in order to say something that is a textbook example, taught at West Point and the Naval Academy, that you can disobey illegal orders.”
But where there’s a will, there’s a way—at least that seems to be Hegseth’s view. So if the appeals court isn’t going to bless his last violation of Kelly’s First Amendment rights, he’ll just gin up a new one.
The administration is rapidly coalescing around the stance that speaking out against the administration at all is a literal crime, First Amendment be damned.
That’s not democracy, but it’s not like the Trump administration cares.
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