Transcript: Senator’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Hits Home: “Bone Spurs!”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Last year, Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats posted a video with a stark message: Military service members and officials are not obliged to carry out illegal orders. This infuriated Donald Trump, and now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking the extraordinary step of bringing disciplinary action against him as a retired Navy man. Mark Kelly offered a striking response to all this in a second video, which is about his own service and about Trump’s lack of it. It’s very powerful stuff. Here’s our question: What if Trump is giving illegal orders to the military? How do we make that part of the discussion? Today we’re working through all this with legal expert Leah Litman, who’s great at puncturing Trump’s lawlessness. Leah, nice to have you on.

Leah Litman: Great to be back.

Sargent: So Pete Hegseth tweeted that these proceedings have begun against Senator Mark Kelly, which are being brought because he’s still subject to military discipline. The procedure could result in his retirement rank getting reduced and a cut to his military pension. Hegseth called Kelly’s warning seditious, which is odd because Kelly was merely stating what the law says about illegal orders. Leah, can you walk us through what Hegseth is doing here and why it’s so wildly inappropriate?

Litman: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess just starting at a high level, it’s no accident that, of course, this administration would think it is illegal to tell people to comply with the law because that’s, at bottom, what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is doing.

What he is doing is attempting to leverage the power that the secretary of defense has over not just service members, but also retired service members, to punish Senator Kelly for his speech, for expressing the view that military officers don’t have to and indeed shouldn’t carry out illegal orders.

So under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the secretary of defense does have power over former service members, but there are real questions about whether Secretary of Defense Hegseth has identified a violation of any law. And second, even if he has, I think Senator Kelly would have very solid First Amendment defenses as well as legislative immunity defenses.

Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s clear that the real reason Trump and Hegseth are in a rage about this is because Kelly is telling people to follow the law.

Litman: Right. Which they don’t want people to do because we have seen so many of their unlawful military escapades. Of course, we are all living through the aftermath of their invasion and capture of a leader of a foreign state.

We have also been living through for the last several months their unlawful summary executions in the Caribbean as well as in the Pacific. So we know they want to order the military to do illegal things. So, of course, they have a problem with people pointing out that military members shouldn’t do that.

Sargent: Yeah, that is very obviously a problem for them. So Mark Kelly did this video, which was a response to this whole thing. I think we should listen to all of it. Here goes.

Mark Kelly (voiceover): I’ve got a question for you. How many generations of Donald Trump’s family have served in the military? Zero. Now for me and my family, service to our country is in my blood. My great grandfather served in the U.S. Navy after immigrating from Ireland. Both of my grandfathers served during World War II. Both of my parents wore uniforms: my dad, in the 82nd Airborne, and both of them as career police officers. And when it was our turn, my brother and I started as volunteer EMTs as teenagers before becoming Navy captains, pilots in the United States Navy, and NASA astronauts. Donald Trump, he deferred the draft five times because he had bone spurs! Look, not everyone has to serve in our military. I get that. But when you’re gonna question my patriotism and lecture me about duty to this country and threaten me with a court-martial, four generations of service to this country earns me the right to speak. Five deferments earns nothing.

Sargent: That’s striking stuff on any number of levels, but one thing that interests me about it is how it sounds like it’s again aimed at members of the military. He’s basically saying in a subtle way here: This commander in chief really doesn’t have your best interests at........

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