Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously emphasized the same military law that the Trump administration has been calling Pennsylvania lawmakers seditious for citing.

Hegseth noted the military rule not to obey unlawful orders during a forum in 2016, when he was a Fox News contributor, in recorded remarks CNN unearthed on Tuesday.

Hegseth spoke at length about his views on the military — and criticism of former President Barack Obama — in a talk titled “The U.S. Military: Winning Wars, Not Social Engineering.” The talk was shared online by the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley and was marked as taking place on April 12, 2016. Hegseth, an Army veteran, had a book coming out that he promoted at the event.

The moderator asked him a question from an attendee: “Can you comment on soldiers who are being held at Leavenworth Prison for being soldiers?”

Fort Leavenworth in Kansas is home to the military’s only maximum-security correctional facility, which houses prisoners convicted of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Hegseth argued that some prisoners at the facility did not deserve to be there but that others were facing the consequences for their unlawful actions.

“There are some guys at Leavenworth who made really bad choices on the battlefield, and I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes,” he said. “If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that.”

“That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief,” he added. “There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.”

It is the same policy that a group of six Democratic members of Congress cited in a video that enraged President Donald Trump.

Democratic U.S. Reps. Chrissy Houlahan of Chester County and Chris Deluzio of Allegheny County, both veterans, joined a group of other veterans and former members of the intelligence community to urge members of the military and intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders” in a video they shared on social media last month.

On his social media website, Truth Social, Trump said they were committing sedition “punishable by DEATH” and shared other posts attacking the lawmakers, including one calling for them to be hanged. Hegseth called them the “seditious six.”

“Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their Commanders undermines every aspect of ‘good order and discipline,’” Hegseth said in a social media post. “Their foolish screed sows doubt and confusion — which only puts our warriors in danger.”

When asked for comment by CNN, spokespersons for the Pentagon and the White House further criticized the Democratic lawmakers who made the video.

Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson also told CNN that the military “has clear procedures for handling unlawful orders” and defended Trump’s orders as legal.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CNN that Hegseth’s position has remained consistent and that his remarks were “uncontroversial.”

Sean Timmons, a Houston-based attorney specializing in military law who served as an active-duty U.S. Army captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) program, told The Inquirer that service members can get in trouble for refusing orders and that it is largely up to commanders to determine whether orders are lawful or not. While the military rules specify not to follow obviously illegal orders, such as war crimes, they also say to presume orders are lawful.

Houlahan expressed disappointment in her Republican colleagues for largely not defending the Democratic lawmakers, though U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Bucks County Republican, said he stood by his Democratic colleagues when asked by The Inquirer.

The fallout from the video has gone beyond rhetoric on X and Truth Social.

The FBI wanted to question the lawmakers involved in the video, and the Department of Defense said it would investigate U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), a former naval officer and the one veteran in the video who is still obligated to follow military laws because he served long enough to become a military retiree. The department threatened to call Kelly back to active duty for court-martial proceedings, which abide by stricter rules than civilian law.

Hegseth also said in his 2016 talk that he believed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Trump’s top rival for the GOP nomination that year, would be the best president at fighting wars, but that he believed Cruz and Trump would both “unleash war fighters and get the lawyers out of the way, which is really a big impediment to how we fight wars.”

The Democratic lawmakers did not cite specific orders in their video announcement, but Trump’s involvement of the National Guard in U.S. cities and the Pentagon’s strikes in the Caribbean have drawn legal debate.

©2025 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Visit at inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.