The Justice Department appealed a court ruling on Tuesday blocking the Trump administration from penalizing Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for urging military members to disobey “illegal orders.”
The DOJ filed the appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on behalf of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the U.S. Navy. The appeal comes in response to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s preliminary ruling earlier this month that determined the Trump administration’s attempt to punish Kelly likely violated the senator’s First Amendment rights.
Kelly responded to the Trump administration’s latest appeal to the ruling by accusing the department of wanting the move to trample “the free speech rights of retired veterans and silence dissent.”
“I went to war to defend Americans’ constitutional rights, and I won’t back down from this fight, no matter how far they want to take it,” he wrote in a post to X.
In January, the Pentagon sought to penalize Kelly for making a controversial video urging U.S. military members to disobey “illegal” orders. Kelly, who served 25 years in the Navy, was 1 of 6 Democrats who delivered a message repeatedly urging military and intelligence personnel to “refuse” unspecified illegal orders. The lawmakers were responding to the U.S. military conducting strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The video sparked backlash from the White House, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying the lawmakers were “suggesting that the president has given illegal orders, which he has not.”
Hegseth swiftly sought to demote the former Navy captain and issued him a letter of censure, as the Trump administration argued the video marked “seditious behavior” and implied that the president “has given illegal orders, which he has not.”
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Kelly responded by filing a countersuit against the administration and suggesting that they have weaponized the government against political opponents. He has framed the actions from the White House as an effort to trample protections for legislative independence, and “intimidate” a political opponent with “a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me.” Hegseth “prejudged” the outcome of his investigation into the legality of the video by declaring Kelly’s statements “seditious” on social media prior to a formal investigation, according to the lawsuit.
“The First Amendment forbids the government and its officials from punishing disfavored expression or retaliating against protected speech,” the complaint reads. “That prohibition applies with particular force to legislators speaking on matters of public policy.”