Jury wallops Trump with ‘one of the most important acts of resistance’ yet: former insider
The Trump administration failed in its efforts to indict a group of six Democratic lawmakers who warned U.S. military personnel not to follow “illegal orders,” prompting one former Trump official to call the “stunning rebuke” a “big deal” and the beginning of the end of what they described as an effort to turn the justice system “into a weapon.”
Last fall and amid the Trump administration’s deadly strikes on suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean, six Democratic lawmakers released a video urging service members to defy unlawful commands, a video that sparked outrage from President Donald Trump, who called their act “seditious” and “punishable by death.”
Trump’s Justice Department soon moved to secure an indictment against the six lawmakers from a grand jury, and on Tuesday, the grand jury outright rejected the DOJ’s request.
That rejection, according to Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security senior official under the first Trump administration, may very well “prove to be one of the most important acts of democratic resistance of Trump’s second term,” he wrote on his Substack Defiance News on Wednesday.
“To me, the most important part of this story isn’t that six lawmakers avoided an absurd and unjustifiable indictment at the hands of a wannabe dictator. The bigger story is that ordinary folks, placed inside the machinery of Trump’s justice system, are increasingly refusing to help turn it into a weapon,” Taylor wrote.
“These grand jurors weren’t activists and protesters tweeting resistance hashtags. They were citizens performing a civic duty. When confronted with an attempt to criminalize political speech, they drew a line. If that doesn’t put a smile on your face this Wednesday, it should.”
The grand jury’s rejection of Trump’s DOJ is not 'the first time a grand jury has rebuffed the administration,” Taylor noted, with notable examples being the rejection of DOJ’s efforts to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, or the famed “sandwich guy” who threw a sandwich at a federal immigration officer.
What made the grand jury’s latest rejection of Trump’s DOJ significant, Taylor argued, was the clear pattern it demonstrated, a pattern he described as a “powerful” message to Trump.
“The public is not playing along with Trump’s repression,” he wrote. “And every time that happens, it sends a message to him more powerful than any press conference: You can try to scare the country into silence, Mr. President, but you still have to get past the people in the room.”