The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, has halted the case against six Democrat lawmakers who appeared in a video encouraging military members to disobey orders, according to an NBC News report citing three people familiar with the matter.
The decision comes roughly two weeks after a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., unanimously rejected Pirro's attempt to secure indictments against the lawmakers, Breitbart News reported. The case, for now, is considered dead in Washington.
The Democrats in question: 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). All six appeared in a video in which they addressed service members directly, telling them they could refuse what the lawmakers characterized as illegal orders.
The framing matters here. These weren't legislators engaged in routine policy disagreement. They recorded a video aimed squarely at active military personnel, urging them to defy their chain of command.
Kelly stated in the video:
"Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders."
Slotkin echoed him: "You can refuse illegal orders."
Notice the construction. The lawmakers didn't file a legal challenge. They didn't hold a press conference arguing that a particular policy violated the statute. They looked into a camera and told soldiers, sailors, and airmen to refuse orders from their commander-in-chief. The word "illegal" does a lot of heavy lifting in those sentences, and none of the lawmakers cited a court ruling or legal finding to support the characterization. They simply declared the orders illegal and told the troops to act accordingly.
That is an extraordinary thing for sitting members of Congress to do. Whether or not it meets the legal threshold for criminal prosecution is one question. Whether it was reckless and corrosive to military discipline is another, and the answer to the second one isn't close.
NBC News reported the core development:
"Roughly two weeks ago, as first reported by NBC News, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., unanimously rejected an attempt by Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, to indict lawmakers over the video, illustrating that grand jurors didn't think the government had passed even the low legal threshold of probable cause required to bring an indictment."
A unanimous rejection at the probable cause stage is a significant setback. Grand juries are famously deferential to prosecutors. The old line about indicting a ham sandwich exists for a reason. For a grand jury to look at the government's evidence and collectively say "no" tells you something about the strength of the case as presented.
That doesn't mean what the lawmakers did was right. It means proving it was criminal, at least under the theory Pirro's office advanced, proved harder than building the political case against it. Those are different standards, and conflating them is a mistake both sides should avoid.
The report notes that the Washington, D.C. grand jury's decision wouldn't necessarily bar a federal prosecutor from bringing a case in a different federal court district. So the legal door isn't permanently shut. But the practical reality is clear: the most direct path to accountability through the courts has collapsed.
President Trump responded to the original video with characteristic bluntness, posting on Truth Social:
"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 frustration is understandable. Six members of Congress publicly encouraged the military to break the chain of command, and they will face no legal consequences for it. At least not yet, and probably not ever.
This episode reveals something more important than any single prosecution. Democrat lawmakers have discovered that they can actively work to undermine military cohesion, frame insubordination as patriotism, and walk away unscathed. The video wasn't a gaffe. It was a strategy. These are veterans and national security figures within the Democrat caucus. They knew exactly what they were doing when they addressed service members directly and used the language of lawful refusal.
The left spent years warning about the politicization of the military. They held hearings about it. They wrote op-eds about it. Then six of their own members recorded a video telling troops to disobey the president, and every institutional alarm fell silent.
No Democrat leader condemned the video. No one in the party suggested it crossed a line. The same people who treated every norm violation of the Trump era as an existential threat to democracy watched their colleagues urge military insubordination and shrugged.
The legal system may not be able to touch them. But voters in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Colorado should remember which of their representatives thought it was appropriate to tell the armed forces to stop following orders. Courts have thresholds. Elections have memories.
The case is dead. The precedent it sets is very much alive.
