Bulwark Takes - Trump Wants JAGs as Immigration Judges. That’s a Disaster. | Command Post

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

When the White House starts moving military lawyers into immigration courts, you want people who’ve actually been there to explain what that means. Ben Parker, Retired General Mark Hertling and former JAG officer, combat advisor, and federal prosecutor Margaret Donovan break down what happens when you pull legal advisers out of war rooms and drop them into political fights, and why that could have real consequences for military readiness and the rule of law.JAGs Shouldn’t Be Civilian Prosecutors

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork. And hi, I'm Mark Hurtling from the Bullwork as a contributor. And also one of the two hosts, Ben and I host, the Command Post podcast. And we are excited today because we have a very special guest who's joined us, Margaret Donovan. Now, Margaret, if I can introduce her very quickly, is a former military lawyer who was a prosecutor in the 101st Airborne Division. She was a legal advisor to a special forces commander.

She was a soldier with two combat deployments to both Iraq and Syria. She was a federal prosecutor after she got out of the Army. And now she's in private practice and lectures at Yale Law School. What an amazing bunch of credentials. Margaret, did I get all that right? Yeah, I think so. I think you've got it all, sir. Thank you.

Okay, great. Thanks. Thanks for coming on with us. We are very excited to talk to you because we have a lot of news about various things related to the military and the law and military lawyers. We're going to talk a little bit later about this article that General Hurtling just wrote for the bulwark. You can read it at the bulwark.com called JAGs shouldn't be civilian prosecutors. It's all about the Trump administration's possible plans to use military lawyers for their mass deportations. And also we learned,

we're filming this on the afternoon of February 11th. So we learned just today that the administration, the Department of Justice, tried to indict. a bunch of members of Congress who had served in the military or the intelligence community for saying that soldiers should disobey illegal orders. So we're going to have to talk about that too. So to get us started, General, why don't you talk a little bit about what you wrote in that piece for people who haven't read it yet? Yeah, well, what I did in that bulwark piece that you helped me with, Ben, and thanks,

as always for that. I talked a little bit about how commanders see their lawyers and what lawyers do within the military. But it was from a commander's perspective. I make no bones about the fact that I didn't go to law school. I didn't know what I was talking about, but I sure did rely on lawyers a lot. And my concerns that I voiced in that piece was pulling a lot of lawyers, and there's indicators that it's upward of 600s out of the military, would create problems with, number one, unit,

discipline, and morale. Number two, it removes the individual who provides legal advice to commanders. And number three, lawyers aren't necessarily trained. are prepared for conducting immigration cases or even adjudicating those cases. So, Margaret, I think you've read the article, but that was my summary. What are your thoughts on all that? Yeah, I mean, I probably couldn't have written it better myself, honestly. I think it is important to have the commander's perspective,

but it's important to have a civilian perspective on this as well. And, sir, as you sort of went through the bullet points of my career, I'm in this really odd moment right now where every assignment I've had is, suddenly relevant in some odd way here. That's never happened to me before that, that, you know, it matters that I was a Sousa, which is a special assistant U.S. Attorney once at Fort Campbell, or that I've done air strikes or any of that. That's been very largely irrelevant, as a civilian attorney, it turns out. But, you know, to your point, having a judge advocate be a Sousa, again, that's a special assistant U.S. attorney, that's actually not wildly unusual on active duty,

because when you have military bases, military posts, you often have what's called exclusive federal jurisdiction. And so if a civilian commits a crime on a military post, rather than having, you know, a full-time federal prosecutor come by and prosecute what is probably a misdemeanor, you can have JAGs detailed to these, basically a federal courthouse, the courthouse that you would have your court martial in just converts to a federal court house, and they try misdemeanor cases. And it's actually really efficient for the U.S. Attorney's Office and for the command, because you have usually like one or two JAGs coming from a headquarters unit and they go on and they do traffic cases, DUIs, maybe theft from the PX, stuff like that.

And it's, I think, really cool to do as a JAG attorney. We thought it was cool because when you're a Sousa on, say, Fort Campbell and you have court, you don't have to wear your uniform. You can wear a cool suit like a civilian. So it was a fun assignment in that sense. But keep in mind. The joys that lawyer takes, that a lawyer would take in just the small things in life. That's great.

Exactly. It was so, it was, you know, a real plus of the job. But keep in mind that that's like one or two JAG officers out of an office of Staff Judge Advocate that may have like 30 or 40 attorneys. And you have attorneys, as you outlined, sir, in that article, doing all kinds of things. So you could have attorneys helping soldiers with their wills. You could have attorneys embedded with command. You could have attorneys deploying forward. You might have attorneys as defense counsel for soldiers who are facing courts martial. And so the South supposition is like almost. almost a niche position. And it's a cool one to get, but you do it for like a year or two, and then you end up going back to the command. So having a Jagasasas house that isn't unusual, but remember the framework that I just described, you're at a courthouse on a federal military installation and you're prosecuting misdemeanor offenses that like the normal federal prosecutor at, say, the Nashville U.S. Attorney's Office isn't going to drive down to Fort Campbell to prosecute, you know, a random DUI that is just a federal case by happenstance of happening on a federal installation. So it's convenient in that way. What you, and what you also see, and now I'm putting on my

former federal prosecutor hat in U.S. Attorney's offices is you may have souses. And those souses come, not from the JAG Corps, but from local DA's offices. So you may, for some reason, SDNY does this, the District of Connecticut does this, you may have a case where you are so integrated with the local law enforcement that it makes sense to bring in one, maybe even two people from the, the local district attorney or state's attorney's office detailed to the office for that case, for that investigation, or maybe just for an abbreviated period of time. So those two sort of dynamics are not really that unusual. What is really unusual is having 30 to 40 jags souses, leave whatever command they're at, and then go into a U.S. attorney's office that is not on a

military installation that is embedded in a civilian community and basically just, tell these people that you're going to wake up on Monday and you're a federal prosecutor. And you're not just doing misdemeanor. You're going to be doing felonies. You're going to be doing immigration. You're going to be doing anything that we tell you. And the results are going to be exactly what you would think they would be if you asked a lawyer to begin practicing something that he or she had no history of practicing. So it's really kind of rife for problems. And I have said, though, I don't think that this is going to work out for the DOJ and for the DOD the way they think it is. And the reason I say that is twofold. One is the reason

that I just mentioned, which is I think you're going to have a lot of appellate issues. You're going to get warrants that get suppressed. You're going to have no true bills, which is when a grand jury refuses to indict somebody. So you're going to have... We've seen that recently, yeah. Yeah, speaking of wish. Like last night. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a minute. That's great. Yeah. So you're going to see basically the mistakes that happen when you have a brand new prosecutor. And I was, you know, when I was a Sousa, I'm confident enough now to admit, I lost a DUI case in my first trial to like a pro se defendant, right? Because I didn't know what I was doing. I was a 20-something who just was told, you know, you're a Sousa at your next assignment. So it takes time. There's a learning curve.

Let me jump in, Ben, because this is, Margaret's going crazy now on this special assignment she had. And that's great. But what I would tell you is lawyers, military officers, lawyers can do anything if given the time and the training to do it. And you evidently evolved into that role. But I'm going to take the different perspective. You're leaving my unit. I'm a commander. I need you there.

And you just said there are 30 to 40 lawyers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. That's because there's tens of thousands of soldiers and a whole bunch of commanders that want you performing the military aspect of legal requirements, like Article 15s and court marshals and, and powers of attorney and all the other things that lawyers do. And what I'll tell you is, as I rose in rank from battalion commander to brigade commander to division commander to US Army Europe commander, lawyers were attached at my hip increasingly so, not just for the care and discipline of soldiers, but also for the legal requirements I had.

So if you in, of the 40 in Fort Campbell, let's say 20 of them are detailed to do this immigration law. If 20 of them take off and only 20 of them are left, what kind of requirements are those remaining 20 going to have? Are they going to go nuts trying to deal with the kind of legal issues that they're going to face? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sorry. I appear to be leading the witness here, and I'm sorry for that. There's a, see, you are a lawyer. You are familiar with this.

No, I mean, look, that's catastrophic to a command. Like, you don't want to be a commander and have, let's say, a UCMJ issue, a disciplinary issue, and not have a lawyer to turn to and ask if you're doing the right thing. Because, first of all, intrinsically, that's bad. You don't want to deprive somebody of due process or of their rights if you don't mean to, and it's just an honest mistake. But also, it's bad as a commander. You don't want to get ensnared in some type of,

allegation that you unfairly prosecuted somebody because you didn't have legal advice, because that's going to be problematic for your own advancement as a commander. So, I mean, I think it's a serious draw. Now, maybe they're getting them from National Guard, maybe they're getting from the reserves. I don't know that they've identified what units they're coming from. But here's the other issue that I have with it, in addition to sort of like the lack of experience, and I guess maybe it's a third issue, since also whatever you're depriving military units of by taking their lawyers.

military lawyers are, I think, really serious about the oath that they take to the Constitution. They have this perspective of being officers of the court, and they're also officers of the military. And when you're a military lawyer, unlike maybe any other attorney, you have to learn to be the person in the room surrounded by a commander, an S3 and S2, all of the command and staff. And you might be the only person in that room who is raising your hand and saying, I don't think that's a good idea. And so you kind of have to like develop almost a fortified spine to be in that role. And so there's a reason why Heggseth doesn't like Jags, right? He doesn't like people telling him that he can't do something. He wants yes men.

And so that is my thought is them going into these roles. I don't think they're going to roll over and do what DOJ asks them to do. Now they may be an experience that they don't identify, that they don't have probable cause for something or something like that. But the problem that you identified in your article, which I think, you know, it's a good thing that they sort of have a very serious perspective on how to bring cases and rights under the Constitution. But what you identified in your article in terms of their ability to leave the job, that is a problem.

So what I mean by that is we've seen waves of resignations from DOJ attorneys. Many of my friends are leaving DOJ, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily. And you don't really have that with JAG officers because to them, this is just going to be an assignment. And as you pointed out, they're going to have to go back to a unit someday. They're going to be worried about their officer evaluation report. They can't just put their rank on the table and say, I'm out that I don't like this warrant. I'm not going to do it. They'll probably get reassigned, right, by sort of virtue of not being able to perform the job. But it is going to have a lasting effect on their careers. That's really unfortunate that you

won't see that with a federal prosecutor. A prosecutor can just resign, you know, whatever they're last evaluation is, is probably a sterling one, and they can move on with their careers. But JAG officers are going to be stuck in the same job. Yeah, Ben, you had a question, and I've got all sorts of things. The first thing I want to point before I let you talk about your question, what Margaret just said is critically important for our listeners to understand, and that's one of the reasons we created command post. When you have a commander with his or her staff, there are intelligence officers, operations officers, the logistics officer. The lawyer, The doctors and the chaplains are part of something called a special staff.

They have a very unique relationship with the commander because they all perform professional requirements beyond the military. So they're part of the profession of arms, but they're also part of the ministry or the medicine or the legal profession. And they're really caught between sometimes the dog and the fire hydrant in terms of what they're allowed to do. Ben, go ahead with you had a question, I think. It's actually, it's more a question from our listeners because you and I talked weeks ago

about the Trump administration's threats to invoke the Insurrection Act, and that started a very interesting conversation among people who watched that video, listen to that podcast about how soldiers or sailors, airmen, Marines, guardians are supposed to know if the orders they get are legal. Now, the obvious answer is you ask the lawyer, right? You go to whatever is the judge advocate general, the Jaguarian Unit, and you say, I've got this order, should I follow it? But the problem is if, you know, what is 600, 700 jags? I don't know. We ran through the numbers earlier. 30%, something like that. 20% of all the jags in the

service are being reassigned to do immigration cases in civilian court. If there is no lawyer, this is my question, how is the average officer or enlisted soldier, airman, Marine, whatever, is supposed to know if their orders are legal or not? Yeah, I think it's a really tough question. particularly when you have an issue like the Insurrection Act or, you know, replace that with anything, right? Greenland, Venezuela. You have waters that are being intentionally muddied. You have a lot of legal terms being thrown around by the White House that may not specifically fit that scenario. You have this principle under the UCMJ that orders are presumed lawful.

And there's a reason for that. Margaret, can I interrupt just for our listeners. The UCMJ is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is a big red, book that the military uses that's very different in some parts from civilian law. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, sorry. You know what? I'm doing the acronym thing and I never, I'm usually good about that. I'm going to be better. So, right, the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it's federal law, basically. It's federal law that applies to the military. It's the penal code. And so there is this principle that orders are presumed lawful. And so that's a good principle to

have in the military because you don't want soldiers questioning everything. That's kind of the whole idea of the militaries. You have good order and discipline. However, if an order is patently unlawful, then soldiers are not bound to follow it. In fact, they are duty bound to not follow it and to refuse it and that they can be prosecuted. So on one hand, under the UCMJ, you can be prosecuted for not following orders. On the other hand, you can also be prosecuted for committing a crime. And so one of, you know, maybe the best examples of this might be you are out deployed and your commander tells you to shoot a civilian, point blank. That's illegal. You're going to know it's illegal.

It's patently illegal. Most soldiers are trained on that. They're going to understand that. If you don't follow the order, you won't be prosecuted for a crime. If you did follow the order, you will be prosecuted for a crime. I hope that's not too confusing. But basically there's that it's a razor's edge balance in some sense. It's not confusing in the sense that you're damned if you do.

you endamed if you don't, right? Because basically, what you're saying is the soldier who was tasked with carrying out whatever the order is has to be right 100% of the time or it's a crime. Potentially, yeah. Basically, and they'll have to prove at court that this was patently unlawful. But like I said, in that example I gave, that's pretty easy. Most people are going to understand that just killing a civilian point blank with no justification is illegal. I say that, but then we're looking at Venezuela. Right. So that brings us to where we, are, which is like you have these reinterpretations that have never been put forth before in terms of targeting drug traffickers in terms of the insurrection, what qualifies for the Insurrection

Act, you know, threatening a NATO partner. And so you have basically rank and file soldiers who really shouldn't be expected to understand the contours of the NATO agreement or, you know, the legislative history of the Insurrection Act. They're relying on the lawyers to know that. And the commanders are relying on the lawyers to tell them what is lawful and what is unlawful. But you can see how this becomes a problem where a soldier will have to show something that is patently unlawful. And the fact that the administration has created this debate about it kind of undercuts the soldier's ability to challenge that. Does that make sense? It does. Margaret, let me, since you brought it up, I'm going to hold you to it. Your credentials are such that your combat time in Iraq and Syria

were contributing to commander strikes. And you told me that you were involved in over a thousand strikes, kinetic operations. Can you tell a little bit about what you do as a lawyer at the side of the commander when they're trying to decide whether or not to strike a target? What plays into that from a legal perspective? Yeah. So the lawyer, it's something called a strike cell. And so that's basically a room full of the people that are participating in building and prosecuting

an air strike. So it could be somebody called a J-TAC, which is a joint terminal attack controller. That's somebody who's talking to the aircraft, who's actually going to drop the bomb. It could be intelligence officers and soldiers. It could be people who are deconflicting airspace. There's all these sort of logistical parts of an airstrike that have to come together in something called a strike cell. And the lawyer is a key part of the strike cell. In a perfect world, lawyers are integrated as one of the people in that cell.

And then you have somebody called a target engagement authority, and that's usually a commander. When I was in Iraq, it was at the one star or above level. When I was in Syria, it was actually much lower. And so you have a lawyer advising whoever is the target engagement authority on the strike. Ideally, the lawyer is involved in the buildup, in the workup of the strike because you don't want to go to a commander as soon as you have eyes on a target. Maybe you've been following the target for days. It's a high value target, something like that. you bring it to the target engagement authority to be ready to strike. You don't want to have a disagreement in that moment because that's just going to create friction.

So ideally the JAG is embedded in the planning in the strike workup, but that's not always the case, or sometimes it is the case and there's a disagreement. And so what the JAG brings to the table is a inside-out knowledge of the rules of engagement for that particular operation. If there is ever a question about whether or not something constitutes, for example, positive identification of the target, whether or not it's a declared hostile force, what counts as directly participating in hostilities, all of these sort of quasi-legal questions. A JAG has to know them backwards and forwards, and also has to be able to distill it to,

like, a five-second delivery to a commander. And I'm sure General Hortling will agree that I think the last thing a commander wants in a combat environment is a JAG, like, citing statute to them. So you have to be able to, like, really deliver that pretty quickly if there's a disagreement and what your backup is. And so you're advising on the rules of engagement and on something called the law of armed conflict. And so there are four principles

to the law of armed conflict, military necessity, proportionality, the prevention of unnecessary suffering and distinction. And so I'm not walking through all four of those elements to a commander when it's time to clear hot on the strike, but I am doing that with the group that's working up the strike. And then if for some reason there is a disagreement, then when the Target Engagement Authority, you know, wants to know why I don't agree,

I just want to have a really sort of strong and well-thought-out basis for why I'm holding up a strike. Because you're in the middle of a firefight, right? It's no small thing for a JAG to do that. And so you really don't want to do that too frequently. You want to be involved in the strike from the beginning to make sure that you're complying with the ROE and with the law firm conflict. Yeah. And, Ben, if I can cite a very simple example of something that happened to me that my lawyer was

intimately involved with over a three-day period. We had intelligence that said a bunch of terrorists were keeping their arms and their ammunition in a mosque inside of a minaret. And we put eyes on target for that mosque and that minaret for about a three-day period. And there were people going in and out of there, having normal services. And we had to determine could we eventually hit that target with an artillery shell, a guided artillery. artillery shell, and the lawyer was there and said, you've got enough based on those four principles that Margaret just talked about to strike the target. Now, that's dicey, because what the people on the ground seat is a mosque being blown up, and the Americans just did it. And unless we had the

proof that we could show people that they had truckloads of ammunition inside this thing, it then became a military target, and it could be struck. Those are the kinds of things that Margaret, as a lawyer, like her would advise commanders on. You know, as we're talking about all the details of what it takes to be a military lawyer and all these intricacies you have to have just right at your fingertips in moments of incredibly high stress, it sounds very different from what it's, what may be what some of these military lawyers are assigned to do, which is to be federal immigration judges. Now, this requires a little bit of explanation because these are not like normal judges under the Constitution who are in the judiciary branch. These are executive judges whose only job is to adjudicate immigration cases for the executive branch. So if you were still, you know, if you basically were pulled right out of Syria and they said,

forget everything you know about airstrikes and go and adjudicate immigration cases, first of all, what would you think, right? What would your thoughts be about like your career? How long is this assignment? How am I going to do that? And also, what would happen to those immigration cases? Like, do you think, how do you think the outcomes of those cases would change, someone in charge like that? Yeah, I think whenever you have somebody who's in this adjudicatory role

in the executive branch, and so what you were referring to, it's basically Article 2 judges, right, meaning Article 2 being the executive branch. Typically, when we think of federal judges, we think of Article 3, totally separate branch of government and not beholden to anything in the executive branch. So I think whenever you have a position where you're supposed to be neutral, you expect an executive branch to respect that neutrality. So my first thought, if you had pulled me out of Syria and told me to go be an immigration judge would be, I think I'd like a career change, please. And I would have, you know, no background.

I mean, you know, we're in the military. You do what assignment they tell you to do. But I would have no background and I would be a very poor candidate for that particular position. And you would get exactly what I think you'll see with Jags assigned to the USAO. What happens when you throw somebody with no experience into a position where they are expected to have a lot of experience? it's not going to be a great outcome immediately. But then you have this added problem. Sorry, if I can just dig in there real quick, because I'm curious, is the result going to be,

oh, they're just going to do a bad job and you're not going to get as many deportations, you're not going to get as many indictments as a result that things get slower? And so you're actually moving through all these cases less? Like, what do you think are like the downstream consequences? Yeah, I think both of those things. I think you could get bad rulings that are ill-informed and not necessarily through the fault of the Jags. They're figuring things out and they're put in the same. position of authority. I think that you could get, you know, Jags who are very deliberate,

and so they take a long time, and that sort of undermines this entire point of trying to expedite and build up the immigration system. But the other issue that I think you have is currently there is a position of the executive branch that basically anybody, even if you're this independent entity, like the head of an independent panel or a judge under Article 2, like an immigration judge, you have an obligation to follow the executor's position on something. And so what we're seeing play out, I think, is a lot of pressure on immigration judges to not be these neutral arbiters, but to, in fact, just enforce what the executive branch says the law is on a particular point.

And that's problematic for every reason that you might think it is. You want these people to be neutral. They are not deportation judges. They are immigration judges. And they are just sort of there to call balls and strikes. And I think we saw at least maybe it was like December, one immigration judge was dismissed for basically granting too many asylum cases. And if that person was a JAG. So I think that sort of goes to my point of it doesn't always work out the way you think you want it. I think the Pentagon or DOJ wants it to when you assign people who really pride themselves on character and on being able to stand up to, you know, for what's right when you put them in these positions. But I think there's a lot of. problems, but probably the very first that you highlighted, just a lack of expertise and a necessary slowdown of the system really undermines the mission there. Margaret, can I ask a different kind of

question? Let me take you in a different direction. I'm sure you were recruited out of law school to come into the military as a lawyer or perhaps had a contract before going into law school. What do you think these kinds of actions are going to do in terms of recruitment, of new judge advocate general core officers, those who will serve as lawyers. What is this going to do to them? I can tell you that they, they, you do not sign up to be a JAG because you want to be an immigration judge, period. You sign up to be a JAG because you have a skill set.

You're a lawyer and you want to serve or you want to do the things that JAGs do that are cool. And it's not all a few good men, I will admit. Not every day of my life was like that. you know, you want to deploy. Maybe you do want to be doing courts martial. One of the, you know, big draws to being a JAG is being a litigator, being able to get that courtroom time and cut your teeth on these cases at an early stage in your career. Or maybe you just want to do DOD contracts, you know, Department of Defense contracts. So there could be any number of reasons that you want to

join the JAG Corps service, skill set, or a particular field in the legal brand. But being an immigration judge is not one of them. That's not why people join. So I think that that's going to have a reduction in people who join thinking that, okay, I could sign up. And the first thing you do is send me to a job that I didn't want to do. And I'll tell you that the DOJ is having this exact same problem. It's on a little bit of a different scale.

But they cannot get federal prosecutors to join because they are either going to be fired summarily, as we have seen and unlawfully, or they will be asked to do things that are clearly going to be outside the bounds of what you are trained on as a lawyer in law school, what every law student knows to be constitutional or not constitutional. So there's a real recruiting problem. And I think that's troubling. I think there's going to be a serious rebuilding phase in the JAG Corps and in the Justice Department as well. And in a lot of other places, too. Ben, I know we're running low on time and you want to ask about the Washington Grand Jury from yesterday. But before you do, I have one last

question for Margaret, if you were the legal advisor to Secretary Hegeseth in terms of this action of providing military JAGs and staff judge advocates to the Department of Justice, what would you tell him? I would tell him that JAGs are not a labor pool for DOJ, and I think that the health of the chain of command depends on having lawyers remain at the units that they're supposed to be at. If DOJ needs more lawyers, they need to start being a better employer and they need to recruit more DOJ lawyers. That's the problem. That's a great answer. If the DOJ, if the DOJ, they do, they do not dip into the DOD, the DOD and the Army and the service branches. They need their lawyers. And if you want to be lethal, you've got to have a lawyer to make it make sense. So that's

what I would tell him. But he would probably fire me. So I don't think he might last very long. DOJ is a recruitment problem. So they thought, oh, where else can we look? The military doesn't have a recruitment problem. Anyway, so we do have to talk about this Washington, D.C. grand jury that refused to approve an indictment for these, I think it was six Democratic members of the House and Senate, all of whom had served the country either in the military or the intelligence community who released this video saying, hey, here's a reminder to everyone who raises their hand and swears a note to the country. you have an obligation to not follow lawful orders. Just open-ended question. You saw this story as a former military lawyer, as a member of the military, as a former federal prosecutor.

What did you make of it? It was the least shocking thing ever that a grand jury wouldn't indict, but it was also shocking that we're here. This has been a fascinating topic to follow since the beginning of this administration to see jury nullification and to see. grand juries reject charges and to see jurors reject criminal charges at trials, that is something that does not happen in the DOJ. You do not get, it's called a no true bill when a grand jury refuses to indict somebody. You do not get no true bills. It's a big deal if you do as a federal prosecutor because

you choose your cases. So you're going to choose the good ones. You're not like a state level district attorney that has to take any crime that occurs. The feds can pick and choose what they prosecute. So I actually think that, you know, it is something almost inspiring, and I realize that sounds odd for what a sort of unusual circumstance we're in. But the framers envisioned this, right? They built the Constitution thinking the people need to reserve some power here. You have checks and balances. And some of that is Article 1. That's the legislator. That's pretty much defunct right now, right? We're not seeing impeachments. We're not. seeing oversight. We're not seeing anything from Congress. You have Article 3, which is the judges, and we are seeing some activity there. We see judges can suppress warrants. They can dismiss cases.

They can dismiss indictments. But they also thought, the framers also thought, central to this new country, was that people will have the power. And so you can invest power and authority with a grand jury under the Fifth Amendment to reject a charge. And that's something that actually was very common at the time of the founding, people being sort of unfairly targeted for whether it was speaking out against British rule or other crimes that the king found to be a crime, but the people didn't. So this idea that a jury can just sort of reject something that an authoritarian figure claims to be a crime, that was a central focus of the framers when they sort of crafted this for us. So it's actually, it's almost like a last stand in some sense. And so it's interesting to see it

come into play that we actually, it's working, right? The specific society, civil society is rejecting the actions of what, you know, my opinion is an authoritarian-styled way of prosecuting. So I actually am kind of inspired by it, yeah. I agree. I've heard someone describe juries, grand and pedicuries, as the most democratic part of the Constitution. Yes, totally. Because it is just random people off the street, stick them in a room, make a make a decision. Yes, and you can stop the executive branch. You can do that as a juror. You know, it's an amazing power. Well, and Ben, as you and I have talked about, this whole case with the six, with the congressional six, but especially with Senator Kelly, is very chilling for senior leaders in the military because they were specifically going after Mark Kelly on this case. And it's not finished yet for him. He breathed a huge sigh of relief last night when they were specifically going after Mark Kelly on this case. And it's not finished yet for him. He breathed a huge sigh of relief last night. that grand jury came back and said they would not indict. But he's still in the window for being

subjected to administrative punishment by the Secretary of the Navy. And that's still another fight that he has to conduct. And that's where it gets the difference between, you know, normal law and UCMJ administrative law. So we're going to continue to watch that very closely. Definitely. And if he needs a good lawyer, we know who to call. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, this was a fun. event. Margaret, we can't thank you enough. You were so informative and charismatic and knowledgeable and thank you for our listeners because what we try and bring to them on command post is some insight into military things that they might not get. And boy, this is a specific one that we needed to focus on today. And I just remind everybody, as Ben was saying earlier,

that I have a piece on the bulwark right now that was posted yesterday called Jack. shouldn't be civilian prosecutors. Read that and all the other great things on the bulwark at bullwork.com. If you like this video, please subscribe to this channel and become a member of a bulwark. And what have I missed, Ben, and all that financial advertising just now? Questions. We want your questions. If you have questions, I'll be looking in the comments if you are a bulwark plus member on substack,

but also you can email us at command post at the bulwark.com. that's command post at the bulwark.com. We had a great time answering a couple questions last week, and we will hope to do so again in the future. Yeah, we cut that off at this one because we wanted more time with Margaret. And now I'm afraid of what we might produce next week, Ben, because we're not going to get a whole lot to top Margaret Donovan.

Thank you for having me.