The Donald Trump administration’s campaign continues against the six Democratic congressmen who last week published a video in which they encouraged the US military to disobey orders from their country’s government which they consider “illegal”. The first was, this Monday, the threat to court-martial Senator of Arizona, former astronaut and retired Colonel Mark Kelly. And this Tuesday the FBI and the Department of Justice launched the mechanism to investigate Kelly and the rest of the group and thus determine whether they committed a crime with that video.
The news that the agency is seeking them for interviews, reported by Fox News, represents an escalation in Trump’s campaign against what he sees as his political rivals. That campaign suffered a major setback Monday when a federal judge dismissed cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that the appointment of prosecutor Lindsey Halligan, handpicked to prosecute the White House charges, when her predecessor in the Eastern Virginia U.S. Attorney’s Office had refused to do so was unlawful.
Justice Department head Pam Bondi, for whom federal Judge Cameron McGowan Currie’s double ruling was a complete rebuke to her desire to immediately please the boss, ruled out, within hours of learning of those decisions, that Currie’s resolutions put an end to anything. “We will take all legal measures possible, including an immediate appeal, to hold Letitia James and James Comey accountable for their unlawful conduct,” Bondi said at a news conference. “I’m not concerned about someone who has been accused of a very serious crime. His alleged actions were a betrayal of the public trust.”
The six representatives in the video are, in addition to Kelly, Senator Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), initiator of the initiative, and Representatives Chris Deluzi and Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania), Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire) and Jason Crow (Colorado). All spoke from their status as military or intelligence veterans. In the video they take turns saying: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You can and you must.”
Trump reacted to its publication with two messages on his social network, Truth. In one he wrote: “SEDITIONAL BEHAVIOR, which may be punishable by DEATH!” “This is truly ugly and dangerous for our country. We cannot tolerate those words remaining like this. SEDITIONAL BEHAVIOR OF TRAITORS!!!”, he added in the other, in his amazed style full of capital letters. The president of the United States also republished the message of a user of that social network who proposed: “Hang them. GEORGE WASHINGTON (founding father of the United States) WOULD DO IT”.
“The Seditious Six”
The announcement that the Pentagon is preparing to investigate Kelly, the only one of the six over whom it has power, was announced in the official Defense Department briefing. And it was accompanied by a message in X from his secretary, Pete Hegseth, in which he christened the group of parliamentarians “the Seditious Six”.
“Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their commanders undermines any semblance of ‘good order and discipline.’ His senseless diatribe sows doubt and confusion, which only endangers our warriors,” Hegseth wrote in his usual warmongering rhetoric. “Five of the six people who appear in that video are not under the jurisdiction of the War Department (one is CIA and four are ex-military, but not ‘retired’).” But Kelly is, he added. The Trump administration has decided to change the name of the Department of Defense to “War,” although this change requires congressional approval which has not yet arrived.
Kelly reacted to those threats Monday on MSNBC’s late-night show. “I saw a missile explode near the plane I was flying. They almost shot down my fighter several times. I flew a space rocket four times. And my wife, (then Congresswoman) Gabby Giffords survived a shooting that killed six people, it was horrible. We know what political violence is and we also know what causes it. Donald Trump’s statements incite others (to commit it). (…) He will not silence us,” he said.
Mark Kelly: “I had a missile explode near my plane. I was almost shot down several times. I flew into space 4 times with a rocket built by the highest bidder. And my wife, Gabby Giffords, while meeting with her constituents, was shot in the head. Six people killed around… pic.twitter.com/eOU0iGeFcV
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 25, 2025
Comey and James celebrated, for their part, that for now Trumpist justice has loosened its grip on them. Comey was appointed in 2013 by President Barack Obama to head the FBI and launched an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the election that brought Trump to the White House in 2016. In May 2017, four months after taking office, the Republican president removed him from office.
James, for his part, was the prosecutor who brought the then-former president and his company, the Trump Organization, to trial for fraud. He won the case, but this year an appeals court overturned the roughly $500 million fine the trial judge had imposed on him.
Trump mounted a good part of the campaign that brought him back to the White House on the idea of ”revenge” against those who, in his opinion, persecuted him with political motivations during the years of his predecessor, the Democrat Joe Biden, during the desert crossing. For now, in his almost 11 months of second term in the White House, he has shown that he does not want to give up his revenge.
