Retired Rear Admiral Who Served Under Trump Warns of Plans to Politicize Military Justice System

Yahoo

18 hours ago

A top retired Navy legal official is sounding the alarm over what he sees as a growing and dangerous politicization of the military legal system and the lawyers who run it.
In a public talk last week and in an interview with Military.com on Thursday, retired Rear Adm. Jim McPherson warned that the Trump administration and leaders in the Pentagon have politicized the selection process for the top lawyers in all three military branches by going around the traditional selection process and requiring nominees to answer screening questions about specific policies favored by the administration.
The warning comes just months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top lawyers for the Army and Air Force without explanation. The Navy's top lawyer had resigned shortly after the election in late 2024. McPherson's remarks seem to confirm the fears that legal experts had shortly after the firings.
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In a lunchtime address to a group of lawyers at an American Bar Association function, McPherson, whose long career included several top civilian posts in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration, noted Hegseth's remarks to Fox News in the days after the firings.
"Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don't exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything," Hegseth said on the cable news channel in February.
Hegseth then went on to note that "traditionally" those top lawyers -- sometimes known by the abbreviation TJAG for "The Judge Advocate General" -- have "been elected by each other or chosen by each other ... small groups of insulated officers who perpetuate the status quo."
"Well, guess what? That status quo hasn't worked very well at the Pentagon. It's time for fresh blood," said Hegseth, a former Fox News host.
During his time serving the Pentagon in the first Trump term, McPherson held the posts of under secretary of the Army, general counsel of the Army, and the acting secretary of the Navy.
In his address, McPherson pushed back on Hegseth's argument, calling it "misinformed."
McPherson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general in the early 2000s, said that military lawyers are there to "ensure the rule of law and operational environments."
"Adherence to the rule of law is essential as a disciplined force for the effective and efficient application of forces and force enabler -- they're not roadblocks," he added.
However, Hegseth has a long track record of disdain for lawyers and the military justice system.
In his last book, the then-Fox News host and commentator wrote that "our adversaries should receive bullets, not lawyers."
"If we refuse to do what is necessary, that is precisely why wars become endless," he wrote.
In the same book, he also wrote that the Geneva Conventions -- international treaties governing the humane treatment of prisoners of war and civilians -- force the U.S. to fight "with one hand tied behind our back."
"If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, are we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?" he mused in the book.
As a Fox News host, Hegseth also took personal interest in and advocated for the release of two Army officers who were charged with war crimes -- 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn -- during the first Trump administration.
Lorance was found guilty in a 2013 court-martial of second-degree murder, making false statements and other charges after he ordered his platoon to fire on three Afghan men on a motorcycle. Golsteyn was charged with murder after killing a suspected, unarmed Taliban bombmaker, later burning his body.
Both men received presidential pardons from Trump.
Hegseth also played a role in helping lessen the punishment of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was charged with war crimes for stabbing a wounded ISIS prisoner but ultimately convicted of posing for a photograph with the corpse.
"Our current secretary, as a Fox commentator, blamed the JAGs that were involved in those cases for railroading those individuals who were simply doing their job," McPherson said.
Now, it appears that the selection process for the new TJAGs is being modified to give Hegseth ultimate say over who heads the lawyers for each service, and candidates are being asked political questions during their interviews.
"My understanding is each of those three services has already held a board, but the guidance to that board was very different than previous boards," McPherson said, adding that "the guidance to the boards was rank order your recommendations."
"In other words, don't come forward with a single name recommendation" as was done in the past, he said.
From there, those groups of candidates would be interviewed by the top civilian for each service and Hegseth would interview each finalist before passing their names to the White House, McPherson said.
"This departs markedly from the statutory requirement that the boards that select the TJAGs be in conformance with all other boards," said McPherson, noting that the requirement says that should be done "as far as practicable."
"I'm sure that's the exception that they will use," he added.
Since McPherson was relaying the information about the process through his own connections and sources, Military.com reached out to Hegseth's office for comment.
They declined to comment and instead referred questions to the services.
According to McPherson, Navy Secretary John Phelan has interviewed at least three finalists as part of the Trump administration vetting of the military lawyers.
Amid those interviews, Phelan asked the candidates whether they agreed "with a policy regarding the mandatory inoculation for COVID and how that policy was executed" and "do you agree with the former policy regarding eligibility for transgender people to enter and remain in the service and how that policy was executed," McPherson said.
McPherson called these "two highly political questions" and policies with "which the TJAG would have never been involved in." The former Navy JAG said that they were "totally inappropriate questions to ask."
Military.com also reached out to Phelan's office with questions about the selection process and the vetting questions.
Capt. Adam Clampitt, a spokesman for the secretary, declined to comment on the selection process and said the service wanted "to maintain the integrity of the convening board process."
Clampitt flatly denied that Phelan asked the vetting questions. "That is categorically false and did not happen," he said.
He did not answer follow-up questions on whether he was calling McPherson, a man who retired as a rear admiral and went on to serve as Army under secretary in the first Trump administration, a liar.
For his part, McPherson was undeterred by the denial. When Military.com reached out, he said that he was standing by his remarks and the source who relayed the information to him.
In an interview Thursday, McPherson also noted that what struck him about the questions was how politically charged they were even compared to his own experience in the first Trump term.
"I went through a vetting process at the White House with the personnel office, and sat through an interview with three other attorneys who worked on the staff there and then the head of that office, and I was surprised that they didn't ask me political-style questions," he said.
"I didn't get hot-button policy questions as a senior political appointee," McPherson said of the experience.
While McPherson shares the belief of many other military legal experts that the JAGs will not be able to act as a legal bulwark, he noted that they are still a powerful voice of conscience and ethics for decision-makers in times when they may be asked to confront challenging orders.
Amid the Black Lives Matter riots that gripped much of the country in the summer of 2020, Trump famously pushed for the use of National Guard troops, including employing deadly force, against protesters and made a controversial appearance at Lafayette Square outside the White House alongside then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
The move was criticized by many who saw Milley's presence there as the military's endorsement of Trump's goal to use the country's troops against its own citizens.
"My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics," Milley later said as part of an apology.
McPherson said that there was a discussion within Army senior leadership at that time about what they would do if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act -- a law that would allow him to use troops to put down protests.
"What are we prepared to do? What are we prepared to say? No, we can't do that. We actually had that conversation," McPherson said, noting that this conversation also involved Milley and Esper.
"I felt confident at the time that we would do the right thing," he said. "We no longer have an Esper or Milley in charge, and that's the fear I have, quite frankly."
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