In its efforts to find every anti-Trump story line it can, the PBS News Hour is touting members of the military who are seeking outside legal advice about whether the missions assigned by the Trump administration are legally justified, starting with the drug-boat bombings.
Brett T. at Twitchy cracked: "It seems as though PBS got a press release from 'The Orders Project,' an outfit run by a former Army lawyer. We're sure it's nonpartisan." It's part of the National Institute of Military Justice, founded in 2020 to question the legality of military matters through pro bono legal consultations.
Military service personnel have been seeking outside legal advice about some of the missions the Trump administration has assigned them. https://t.co/vFrl9tJg9a
— PBS News (@NewsHour) November 14, 2025
Is it ideological? Well, they also have a "Trans Representation Project," touted as "a pioneering initiative dedicated to defending the rights of transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and other gender-diverse service members facing adverse actions due to their gender identity."
So they are a beautiful fit for PBS, which is a press-release service for LGBTQ activism.
The drug-boat bombings have been conducted without much public disclosure, so it's a worthy subject for journalist questions. But our first question is: Has this Orders Project ever protested a Biden military action, like droning a family in Afghanistan shortly after its withdrawal fiasco? Hitting the search engines says No.
On his LinkedIn page, Frank described the subject as "the risk military members face with assurances of immunity when the subject matter includes the commission of atrocity crimes."
Anchor Amna Nawaz began with the softball: "Tell me about the calls you have been receiving specific to those U.S. military strikes on boats. How many calls and what are people asking?" He said some officers have questioned "the new military activities in the Caribbean," so Nawaz followed up: "In other words, pressure to get on board with the decision to carry out the strikes. Is that what you're saying?" The flavor of all this is they're looking for heroes who will disobey this commander-in-chief.
She also asked, "there's a DOJ memo that basically says soldiers would be immune from prosecution if involved in these boat strikes, how do you react to that?" This is where the "atrocity" talk came in from Rosenblatt: "For example, if a service member relies on DOJ immunity, that doesn't mean that a state may not prosecute them for any crimes they commit, or if they travel to another country. If there are allegations that they have committed atrocity crimes, then other countries are — could invoke their own universal jurisdiction and put them before the national courts of another country."
Nawaz also questioned domestic deployments, of the National Guard being ordered to protect citizens in big cities with crime problems. "And then related to the National Guard deployments, you told my colleague earlier you're also fielding calls related to that. What are those questions?" Rosenblatt replied:
We're getting an appropriate level of curiosity, because anybody who's been following the courts, it's like watching a tennis match right now, back and forth every day between a district court enjoining the president's actions and a court of appeals lifting that, and the Supreme Court acting on their emergency docket.
So when people are being told or to anticipate a deployment to an American city, they do have some questions about this. And we just try to help them figure out what's right for them, to help them feel better about what they're doing or where they need to raise questions, to ask the right questions of their leaders to make sure that they are remaining compliant with their — not only their legal obligations, but so that there's no moral injury later on that they don't do something that they knew was wrong at the time.
This is a curious argument, since liberals usually complain that the National Guard members stand around a lot, which doesn't sound like a "moral injury" question.
