This is the first installment of “The Other Side,” a monthly piece where I take a position many of you hold, sometimes one I hold myself, and build the strongest case against it that I know how to build. The voice stays hot. The method stays cold.
Maj. Jason Watson was formally charged on August 24 under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Air Force confirmed it the next day.
You have seen the post. It’s written and shared in many different ways but here’s a sample of what’s being distributed on social media:
BREAKING: Air Force Maj. Jason Watson now faces charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including three specifications under Article 88 for allegedly making “contemptuous” statements about Trump.
Read that again. An active-duty officer is being prosecuted because he publicly called for the president’s impeachment.
When a leader responds to criticism from the ranks by putting service members in confinement, he stops governing as a president. He starts governing as a dictator.
The post landed in your feed from people you trust, and it says the Air Force hit an officer with three counts of contempt for one reason alone, that he called for the president’s impeachment. The post makes for a clean story that fits inside a screenshot and travels fast and lands hard on anyone who already believes this administration punishes Americans for talking.
Something didn’t feel right. So I did a little digging.
The version everyone is sharing is incomplete. The pieces it drops change how you should read every part of what is left.
Do I feel like Watson should be allowed to say whatever he wants? Sure I do. But here’s the deal, there’s more to the story than hating Trump, what his administration is doing to this country, and then speaking out about it.
Facts matter and so I thought it would be a good idea to look at the record and start with the charge sheet.
Three charges sit on that paperwork, one for each article, carrying ten specifications between them. Three specifications fall under Article 88, the contempt charge everyone is talking about. Five more come from Article 92, which covers orders and regulations, and the final two come from Article 133, conduct unbecoming an officer.
The three Article 88 specifications trace to three separate appearances. A June interview with the Defenders of Our Republic newsletter on Substack. His protest in uniform at the Capitol on July 1. A CNN interview with Erin Burnett that aired August 17.
It’s worth knowing the following. Watson is 40, an Air Force Academy graduate, a father of two, seventeen years into his career, and as of July he was assigned as a staff officer in Bydgoszcz, Poland. That last detail matters more than it looks. It’s why one of the orders counts involves leave.
He also has a history here. Last year he spent 22 days on a hunger strike on Capitol grounds, anonymous under a white mask and white jumpsuit, standing beside a sign that read Impeach. Convict. Remove. The command will point to that. It shows he understood exactly what he was doing when he took the mask off.
July 1 on the House steps
Watson spoke at a news conference put together by the Removal Coalition, an advocacy group founded by Jessica Denson that lobbies Congress on impeachment. He then walked halfway up the House steps in uniform, to the chained railing, holding a sign that read Impeach. Convict. Remove.
Rep. Al Green escorted him to the steps and left the area. Capitol Police told him to stop demonstrating. He refused. They arrested him under D.C. Code 22-1307, crowding, obstructing, and incommoding, a statute that covers blocking the entrance to a public building. It says nothing about members of Congress. That part came from Capitol Police, who explained the arrest by saying it is generally against the law for the public to demonstrate on the House steps unless they are with a member of Congress, and who pointed out that plenty of other spots on Capitol grounds allow demonstrations. What that arrest was about was location, and an order he would not follow.
Then the charge went away. Prosecutors dropped it. The Air Force opened its own investigation and restricted Watson to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
Carry that correction with you, because the crowd sharing the screenshot has turned an arrest about where a man was standing into proof that the government now jails people for their opinions, and the civilian system that made that arrest walked away from it.
Now carry the other half. That same protest also produced one of the three Article 88 specifications and one of the two Article 133 specifications. The military charges reach what he said, in a way the civilian charge never did. Both things are true at once, and the honest version of this story holds them together.
One more piece of context the sharers leave out. Watson has said publicly that he is not a Democrat and does not share Green’s policy positions. He also stood on that stage and said he was there with Green because Green was the only member of Congress with the courage to force a vote on articles of impeachment.
Then he stopped wearing the uniform
On August 17, Watson sat for a CNN interview with Erin Burnett and repeated his criticism of the president, telling her that Trump had failed as president and was violating the Constitution. He then told his chain of command he would no longer wear his uniform. The Air Force says it ordered him into pretrial confinement on August 18, based on probable cause to support allegations of continued misconduct. Some outlets describe a second arrest on the 17th with confinement the following day. Go with the Air Force’s own date on the confinement order. He sits today in a county facility in Maryland on a military hold.
That last part is missing from almost every post you have seen. It matters. A refusal to wear the uniform is an orders problem, and orders problems are the exact thing Article 92 exists to punish.
We now know what the rest of those orders counts allege, because his own attorney released the charge sheet. The five Article 92 specifications allege that he violated Defense Department regulations barring troops from partisan political advocacy, that he wrongfully wore his uniform at the Capitol press conference, that he broke leave regulations by traveling to Washington, and that he refused to wear his uniform to work the morning after the CNN interview. The two Article 133 specifications attach to the Capitol protest and the August 17 interview.
What the Air Force is holding
Service members do not carry the civilian First Amendment protection you and I carry, and that is settled ground. It’s been worked out over decades of Supreme Court cases like Parker v. Levy, Brown v. Glines, and Goldman v. Weinberger, which treat discipline inside the ranks as something this country needs more than it needs the freedom of one officer in uniform to say whatever he wants on a national stage. Article 88 entered the code with the UCMJ in 1950, took effect in 1951, and reaches only commissioned officers. Defense Department rules bar partisan political activity in uniform.
The Air Force also points to a memo Secretary Troy Meink issued in September 2025 on public communications, which reminded every airman and guardian that they are responsible for complying with the laws and regulations governing speech and political activity. They are also reminded in the same memo that said conduct that violates lawful regulations, discredits the service, or undermines good order and discipline gets addressed directly and promptly. In July, after the Capitol arrest, Meink said publicly that he expected all airmen to comply with the laws and policies governing personal conduct, political participation, and wear of the uniform.
The command’s story is short. He knew the rules and broke them in front of national cameras, and he did it again after police had already put him in handcuffs once.
His lawyers have something to work with
Article 88 requires proof that the words were contemptuous. That word carries weight. Franklin Rosenblatt teaches law at Mississippi College. He retired from the Army as a JAG lieutenant colonel and now serves as president of the National Institute of Military Justice. He puts the standard this way: insulting, rude, and disdainful conduct, or otherwise disrespectfully attributing to another a quality of meanness, disreputableness, or worthlessness.
The Manual for Courts-Martial goes further and says that adverse criticism of a named official in the course of a political discussion, even emphatically expressed, may not be charged under the article if it is not personally contemptuous. Criticism on its own does not clear the bar. Rosenblatt said this case may need an Article 32 preliminary hearing to sort out whether Watson’s remarks were true or amounted to fair criticism of the kind officers have always been allowed to voice.
Understand what that argument does and does not do. The Manual for Courts-Martial says flatly that the truth or falsity of the statements is immaterial under Article 88. So this is not a truth defense. It is a categorization fight. His lawyers will argue his words were reasoned political criticism rather than personal scorn, and everything about the content, the audience, and the tone gets pulled into that fight.
Watson gave that argument something to hold. At the July 1 news conference he said that ordering military action against foreign countries with no imminent dire threat to American interests, as he put it was done with Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, takes power the Constitution hands to Congress and violates the War Powers Clause. He then claimed those violations killed 13 service members and injured hundreds more. That figure is his, made in early July, and later reporting has put U.S. military deaths connected to the Iran conflict higher. Attribute it to him and let the hearing sort it out. It is the sort of claim a defense lawyer builds an entire proceeding around, because it frames the words as constitutional argument rather than insult.
Rare, but not extinct
Article 88 sat unused until the 1965 court-martial of Lt. Henry Howe, an Army second lieutenant convicted after an off-base Vietnam protest in El Paso where he carried a sign calling President Johnson a fascist. He drew a dismissal and a year at Fort Leavenworth. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later granted him parole.
CNN’s review found two Article 88 convictions since 1951, and the second one is recent. In 2021, Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller pleaded guilty at a special court-martial to Article 88 and five other violations tied to viral videos attacking the handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal. He forfeited $5,000 in pay for one month and was out of the Marine Corps by that December, short of a pension.
Scheller is the case to keep in front of you. It shows what a command does when it wants this handled without a headline sentence, and it shows a special court-martial doing the work. Watson’s attorney says his client is the first major in history charged under the article. Nobody has independently verified that, so treat it as counsel’s claim.
Four things decide this case, and none of them made the headline
The Article 92 counts carry the most uncertainty. Violating a lawful general order or regulation carries up to two years. Failure to obey some other lawful order carries six months. Dereliction through neglect carries three months with no punitive discharge available. Article 88 itself carries dismissal, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a year of confinement per specification. Those are ceilings written by Congress, not predictions, and nobody outside the prosecution knows yet how the government will stack them. Every post serving you a single exposure number as a fact is guessing.
Forum selection drives his career. A special court-martial has no power to dismiss a commissioned officer. Only a general court-martial holds that power. Watson has served 17 years and sits roughly three years from a retirement that requires 20. A general court-martial can end that, though it is not required to, and the Air Force can also pursue administrative separation on a separate track regardless of which court convenes. Scheller went to a special court-martial and still left without a pension.
Watch for an Article 32 hearing. A preliminary hearing is required before charges can be referred to a general court-martial unless the accused waives it. No such hearing is required for a special court-martial. If one gets scheduled, the government is pointed at the forum that can take his commission. If none appears, read that too.
Nothing has been referred to trial. Preferral is the charging step, the swearing of charges by an accuser. Referral is a separate call made by a convening authority. The Air Force says the charges and evidence are under review to determine whether the case should be tried by court-martial, and the Air Force says the Air Force District of Washington would oversee the trial if this goes to a general court-martial, with that command’s commander serving as convening authority.
The part worth arguing about
Strip out the errors and something real stays standing. A statute with two known convictions in seventy-five years came off the shelf and landed on one officer three separate times inside eleven weeks. Prosecutors made a choice there. Most commands settle matters like this quietly, through counseling and administrative action, or through nonjudicial punishment that never sees a courtroom. This one went to formal charges and to a jail cell before a trial date exists, after the civilian system looked at the same conduct and dropped its charge.
Hold two ideas at once. Watson broke rules he swore to follow, and by his own account he chose to break them in public and on purpose. The response to him looks sized for the cameras. Both of those thoughts fit in one head without strain.
Plenty of readers land somewhere else, and they have solid ground under them. An officer who stages a national protest in uniform, travels from an overseas assignment to do it, and then announces he will stop wearing the uniform has handed his command a discipline problem with no quiet exit. Scheller’s judge said the same thing from the bench, calling Article 88 conduct serious and corrosive because it degrades public trust in the military and its civilian authority.
The social media posts about this story should stop sharing the three count version. It drops the orders counts and the uniform refusal, it drops the reason Capitol Police made the July arrest, it drops the fact that the civilian charge went away, and it drops a 2021 conviction that tells you far more about how these cases actually end than 1965 does. As you can see, the true story is so much more.
Watch which court-martial they convene, and watch whether an Article 32 hearing gets scheduled first. Those two decisions, made by commanders whose names will never trend, tell you more about the purpose of this prosecution than every headline written about it so far, so pay attention to them now, before the next wave of noise rolls through and washes the facts out to sea.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
PS - Tonight I’m going on Chris Cuomo’s show to break down the legal side of the newest changes to mail-in voting, ballot restrictions, and U.S. Postal Service rules. Tune in, because these rules decide whether your vote gets counted. I covered a lot of this ground Tuesday with journalist Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson. Watch that conversation here before tonight’s show so you walk in already knowing what is at stake.
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Thank you Mitch. Interesting article! I wish Major Watson the best. He deserves our support.
I had wondered about whether “truth” mattered in “contemptuous” as it does in libel or slander. Also whether a demand to” impeach, convict, remove” a president is necessarily “partisan” ( in many cases, as the present, the next president would be of the same party.).
I need to read this a few more times but I love the general approach ( arguing a point widely viewed one way) and this one in particular led me to upgrade to paid.