Grand jury rejects Pirro's bid to indict Democratic lawmakers over military disobedience video

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's office has dropped its case against six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a video encouraging military members to disobey orders, according to a report citing three people familiar with the matter. The decision came after a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., unanimously rejected Pirro's attempt to secure indictments.

The grand jurors concluded the government hadn't cleared even the low legal threshold of probable cause required to bring an indictment. That's a significant bar to fail to meet. Grand juries are famously accommodating to prosecutors. The old legal adage holds that a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. This grand jury wouldn't indict six Democratic members of Congress.

What the lawmakers actually said

The case centered on a video featuring Sens. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ), along with Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), and Jason Crow (D-CO). In the video, Kelly can be heard saying:

"Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders."

Slotkin echoed the same message: "You can refuse illegal orders."

President Trump responded to the video forcefully, labeling the lawmakers as "traitors" and stating they "should be in jail." He elaborated in a Truth Social post:

"THE TRAITORS THAT TOLD THE MILITARY TO DISOBEY MY ORDERS SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW, NOT ROAMING THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS TRYING TO EXPLAIN THAT WHAT THEY SAID WAS OK. IT WASN'T, AND NEVER WILL BE! IT WAS SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME. THERE CAN BE NO OTHER INTERPRETATION OF WHAT THEY SAID!"

The legal and political reality

There is a meaningful distinction between telling service members they may refuse unlawful orders and telling them to refuse lawful ones. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does, in fact, require service members to disobey unlawful orders. That's been settled law since Nuremberg. The question was always whether these lawmakers were invoking that principle in good faith or weaponizing it to undermine legitimate presidential authority.

The grand jury's unanimous rejection suggests the evidence didn't support the latter interpretation, at least not to the level of criminal conduct. That doesn't mean what these Democrats did was wise, patriotic, or even honest. It means it wasn't indictable.

And that's the frustration. These lawmakers knew exactly what they were doing. They weren't delivering a civics lesson. They were signaling to military personnel that the commander-in-chief's orders should be treated as suspect. They wrapped political opposition in the language of legal duty. It was calculated, it was partisan, and it was corrosive to civil-military relations, as Breitbart reports.

But corrosive isn't criminal. And a prosecution that can't survive a grand jury does more damage to the cause of accountability than the underlying offense.

What happens next

The case is now considered dead in Washington. Notably, a grand jury rejection in D.C. wouldn't necessarily bar a federal prosecutor from trying to bring a case in a different federal court district. But there have been no public indications that any such effort is underway.

For conservatives, this outcome should sharpen the focus. The left's strategy of using legal language as political cover is not best fought in courtrooms where the evidentiary standards work in their favor. These six lawmakers will now wear the grand jury outcome as vindication. They'll fundraise off it. They'll claim they stood up to political prosecution and won.

The deeper problem

The real issue was never whether Kelly and Slotkin would go to prison. It was the precedent their video attempted to set: that Democratic members of Congress can publicly encourage the military to second-guess the president, and dress it up as respect for the rule of law.

Consider the pattern. When a Republican president exercises authority, the left discovers an urgent concern for checks and balances. When their own president governs by executive order, those concerns evaporate. The principle isn't the principle. The principle is opposition.

Six members of Congress looked into a camera and told the armed forces that following the president's orders might make them complicit in illegality. No specific order was cited. No legal analysis was offered. Just a blanket suggestion that obedience itself was suspect.

A grand jury said that's not a crime. Fine. It's still a disgrace.