AURORA | Despite being rebuked by a grand jury earlier this year, President Donald Trump resurrected his failed attempt to persuade justice officials to seek criminal action against Aurora Rep. Jason Crow and other Democratic congressional veterans for a video message made a year ago.
“Will the Seditious Six ever be prosecuted?” Trump wrote on his social media platform. “What they did was a great violation to our Country and its Constitution!”
Trump was referring to a failed attempt to have his administration bring criminal charges against Crow, Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin and Reps. Chrissy Houlahan of Penn., Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire and Chris Deluzio of Penn. after the lawmakers created a video featuring them as they told members of the military that they cannot and must not follow illegal orders from the president or military superiors.
“He’s coming after me again, calling for my prosecution,” Crow said in a recorded statement Thursday. “We will never back down from our oath to the Constitution, to our commitment to the rule of law.”
Crow and all of the lawmakers accused by Trump previously served in the military or at intelligence agencies.
Grand jurors in Washington in February declined to sign off on any charges related to the video. Experts said grand jury rejections are extraordinarily unusual, but they have happened repeatedly recently as jurors who have heard the government’s evidence have come away underwhelmed in a number of cases.
Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s office and the Justice Department didn’t say Thursday whether they would resurrect the effort to charge the Democratic lawmakers with some kind of crime.
The FBI last November began contacting the lawmakers to schedule interviews, an outreach that came against the backdrop of broader Justice Department efforts to punish political opponents of the president.
Trump and his aides labeled the lawmakers’ video as “seditious” — and Trump said on his social media account last year that the offense was “punishable by death.”
The legislators all said the speech was clearly protected, and that the message itself was defensible, as it is standard military policy to instruct members of the military with the same information.
The lawmakers at the time didn’t mention specific circumstances in the video. But at an event last year in Michigan, Slotkin pointed to the Trump administration ordering the military to blow up small boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean accused of ferrying drugs and continued attempts at deploying National Guard troops into U.S. cities despite legal setbacks.
Bipartisan lawmakers this week cited the military action against alleged drug-boats as fodder for the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which failed to gain traction in the House.
Crow said Thursday he would not back away from the message he delivered to military members in the video last year.
“More than a week after America said ‘enough is enough,’ that we want to move past the vitriol, the chaos that Donald Trump has brought, he continues to double down, triple down on all that chaos,” Crow said. “If he wants to come at us, let him come at us. We’ll resist and fight back as we always do.”
— The Associated Press contributed to this story.