Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin said she’s been notified that an FBI counterterrorism investigation has been opened against her and five other congressional Democrats whom President Donald Trump has accused of “seditious behavior.”
Slotkin and the other five members of Congress released a video last week, emphasizing that the Uniform Military Code of Justice allows military and intelligence services personnel the right to refuse illegal orders. That led Trump to make comments like “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH” on social media and elsewhere
(The White House later backtracked on those comments, saying Trump does not actually plan to execute members of Congress, but that the video amounted to urging troops to disobey presidential orders.)
Slotkin said Tuesday that the response from Trump — and now the apparent FBI investigation — are “exactly why we made the video.”
“He [Trump] believes in using the federal government against his perceived adversaries, and he's not afraid to use the arms of the government against people he disagrees with,” Slotkin said.
“If he wants to use the FBI and [FBI director] Kash Patel against us, that is his choice. But it just reaffirms why we made this video in the first place.”
Slotkin said she and the other members of Congress who appeared in the video — all of them veterans of either the U.S. military or intelligence services — felt strongly that “we were doing what we believed was right, based on our oath of office to the Constitution.” She said they decided to act after being approached by current members of the armed services or intelligence communities, who expressed fear that they might have to wrestle with whether or not to obey an illegal order.
“It was the sheer number of [military] people coming to us and saying ‘I'm worried, I'm being sent to [a major U.S. city], and I'm concerned I'm going to be asked to do something that I don't know if I should do,’” said Slotkin, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
And for those involved in the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug cartel activity in the waters of the Caribbean and near South America, Slotkin said the situation is even murkier. “It's a secret list of groups that we’re now in armed conflict with. And it's based on a legal explanation that's classified and not available to the operators who are carrying out these strikes,” she said.
“So they started coming to us and saying ‘Hey, I'm not sure what to do. Do you have any thoughts? Do you have any advice?’ And that's where the video came from.”
After Trump’s “sedition” comments, “We saw an immediate and massive uptick in the number of death threats that we got,” Slotkin said of herself and the other video participants. “We had a bomb threat at my family farm where I live. My family has been harassed. It's been an immediate change to our life.”
But Slotkin said their resolve remains steadfast. “I don't think this represents who we are,” she said. “And I refuse to believe that this is the new normal. I'm not going to accept that."
