Why Trump fired the top military lawyers

People who know and enforce the law would have been inconvenient during the president’s undeclared war in the Pacific and the Caribbean.

- JACKIE CALMES COLUMNIST

A PLACE CARD at a Cabinet meeting misspells Pete Hegseth’s title. He and other military leaders are accused of violating the law.

(CHIP SOMODEVILLA Getty Images)

AT LEAST President Trump didn’t “kill all the lawyers” first, literally following Shakespeare's words in “Henry VI, Part 2” on evading the rule of law.

Instead, just a month into his second term in February, he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth simply fired the top lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force, known as judge advocates general, or JAGs.

“It’s what you do when you're planning to break the law: You get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down,” Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks said at the time, according to the New York Times. She wasn’t alone in her fear, or her prescience.

Nine months later, the story-lines embroiling Trump are getting all tangled up, creating a knotty mess of lawlessness, hypocrisy and potential war crimes in what conservative columnist George Will has dubbed “this moral slum of an administration.” And that owes at least in part to the fact that the president has gotten rid of good lawyers and other guardrails so he can act with impunity.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Americans got news of two utterly contradictory actions that grotesquely captured Trump’s amoral and immoral instincts — one involving killings, the other a presidential pardon.