President Donald Trump threatened to execute a group of Democratic lawmakers over behavior his very own Attorney General Pam Bondi was actively promoting just last year—as part of an effort to keep him out of jail, according to the New York Times.
“Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders,” Bondi wrote, in no uncertain terms, in a Supreme Court filing in March 2024, the NYT reported.
“The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill nonmilitary targets,” she went on. “Indeed, service members are required not to do so.”
She filed her “friend of the court brief,” the NYT reports, in her capacity as an attorney for conservative think tank America First Policy Institute, in March 2024, before Trump was re-elected in November 2024.
The document came in support of Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court for immunity from prosecution over allegations of election interference.
Last month, Trump responded to a video posted by six Democratic lawmakers, reminding U.S. military service members they should disobey illegal orders, by claiming they’d committed “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOUR, punishable by DEATH!”
Under Bondi’s watch, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has requested interviews with those officials, and is reportedly considering an official probe. The Daily Beast has reached out to the DoJ for comment.
The attorney general’s comments in her brief, which would appear to counter the basis of both the president’s and the FBI’s response to the video, came as part of a legal campaign to keep Trump out of jail for his efforts to undermine the 2020 election.
Bondi’s filing pertained specifically to a statement from one of Trump’s lawyers, D. John Sauer, who’d told an appeals court during earlier arguments that hypothetically, a president who’d ordered the military to kill a political rival should not be subject to criminal prosecution, the NYT reported.
After Sauer’s comments apparently went down poorly with the judge, Bondi intervened to argue the hypothetical had been irrelevant because military officials would likely have disobeyed that order anyway.
“A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival, and the members of the military are required not to carry out such an unlawful order,” she said. “It would be a crime to do so.”
Trump won the case.
