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 Hegesath, 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 Littman, who's great at puncturing Trump's

lawlessness. Leah, nice to have you on. Great to be back. 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. Hegset 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

Heg Seth is doing here and why it's so wildly inappropriate?

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess just starting at a high level, you know, 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. You know,

what he is doing is attempting to leverage the power, you know, that the

Secretary of Defense has over not just service members, but also retired service members, to punish

Senator Kelly for his speech, you know, for expressing the view that military officers don't have to,

and indeed shouldn't carry out illegal orders. And so under the

...