Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth defended the Trump administration’s purge of top military lawyers because they don’t want people in those roles who “attempt to be roadblocks to… anything that happens.”
Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream brought up the firings, which happened Friday night, in an interview with Hegseth on Sunday. She asked him him to react to a quote from Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks, who wrote on X (formerly Twitter) of Trump’s firing three star judge advocate generals: “In some ways that’s even more chilling than firing the four stars. It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”
“I don’t know who Rosa is or what her hyperbole is all about,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything — anything that happens in their spots.
Hegseth continued, “What we know about these TJAGS — they’re called TJAGS inside the military — traditionally they’ve been elected by each other or chosen by each other, which is exactly how it works with the chairman as well. [A] small group of insulated officers who perpetuate the status quo. Well guess what? The status quo hasn’t worked very well at the Pentagon. It’s time for fresh blood.”
The people in these roles “serve as a conscience of the military and a moral guide as to what’s right and wrong,” Don Christensen, a retired military judge and former top prosecutor for the Air Force told CNN, calling the firings “extremely concerning.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and professor at New York University who studies fascism and authoritarianism, responded to Hegseth’s answer on X. “All of this is a process of rearranging government for an accelerated transition from democracy to autocracy,” she wrote. “That includes a new domestic role for the military and new autocratic allies abroad.”
Hegseth said he was “requesting nominations” for the Judge Advocates General
In addition to firing JAGs, the administration also sacked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., a Black man who had vocally supported the Black Lives Matter movement, nominating retired Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan “Razin” Caine, a white man, to replace him. Both Trump and Hegseth have decried “wokeism” in the military. Late last month, Trump signed an executive order removing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs from the armed forces, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.
The order instructed Hegseth to conduct “an internal review that documents actions taken in pursuit of DEI initiatives, including all instances of race and sex discrimination and activities designed to promote a race- or sex-based preferences system.”
Even prior to joining the administration, Hegseth positioned himself as strongly anti-DEI.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Hegseth in November on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” per CNN. “But any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go. Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about,” Hegseth said.
In June last year, according to ABC News, Hegseth said on “The Right Take With Mark Tapson” podcast: “Every time I hear a military leader say [diversity is our strength], I throw up in my mouth a little bit more, because if they believe it, it shows you how sideways and how indoctrinated they are.”
On Fox, Hegseth told Bream that Brown was “not the right man for the moment.”
credit: Rolling Stone
