From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, December 2nd.

We want to use the luxury of time that we have on this show to play some longer audio clips of really one of the most important

legal human rights and patriotism conversations taking place in our country right now and discuss

them with a journalist who is covering the story and with you if you have ever served in the

military. Maybe you know the basics. A few weeks ago,

some Democratic members of Congress released a video urging U.S. service members not to obey illegal orders. They didn't give an example, but the video seemed to stem from concern

about some of the orders given recently by the Trump administration, including Pete Hegsef,

the Secretary of Defense, what Trump prefers to call the Secretary of War, such as killing scores

of people on suspected drugboats in the Caribbean rather than arresting the alleged smugglers

and bringing them to justice, and also deploying the U.S. military domestically

to American cities, right?

Hexeth and Trump responded by calling the video seditious rather than by saying, of course,

we follow American law on the laws of war.

No, they called the video seditious.

The president posted things like, did you see this one,

that George Washington, George Washington, would have had the Congress members hanged for saying

things like that, and they should be arrested and tried. And sure enough, he ordered an FBI

investigation on them, plus there's a Pentagon investigation of Senator Markelly in particular.

Then came the Washington Post story over Thanksgiving weekend that said,

Hexeth ordered the military to kill two survivors from one of the boats, the U.S. attacked at sea, people who are apparently

defenseless after the boat was destroyed and the other crew members were dead. Maybe you know that much.

So we're going to dig in a little bit now with this extended audio and a guest. And as I say,

...