It was a moment I’ll never forget: Friday afternoon, November 15, 2019.  After spending Veterans’ Day week in snowy, freezing Leavenworth, Kansas, I returned to Charlotte for a court appearance that morning in neighboring York County.  I was talking to a friend on my cell phone, driving eastbound on Pineville-Matthews Road, when my phone beeped with an incoming call.

The screen flashed: The White House.

I pulled off the road into a Panera Bread parking lot and answered the call.  It was the president’s military attaché.

“Mr. Brown, I’m here with the president.  The president wants to know if he has permission to call your client.”

For me, this was one of those surrealistic, Forest Gump–like moments beyond description — where a country boy from Plymouth, N.C. gets a call from the Oval Office.  Something seemed out of place about it all.  But that call marked the first of five that I would receive from the White House that afternoon. 

Our client, Army 1st lieutenant Clint Lorance, was a former 82nd Airborne paratrooper, railroaded by Obama’s Pentagon under suicidal rules of engagement.  On July 2, 2012, Clint’s platoon faced a motorcycle speeding toward them in a restricted area in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.  With VBIED (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device) attacks against Americans becoming more frequent, four Afghan National Army soldiers accompanying the platoon fired first at the motorcycle.  Clint’s men opened fire.  Two of the three riders were dead.  DNA evidence later linked two of the riders to Taliban bomb-makers, yet no bodies were recovered, and no ballistics matched American bullets.

Despite this, Obama’s rule of engagement dictated, “Don’t fire unless fired upon.”  The Pentagon made an example of Clint, who never pulled the trigger.  Positioned far back in the line, Clint couldn’t see the riders.  Yet Obama’s Pentagon charged him with “murder” and coerced his men to testify against him under threat of prosecution for murder themselves.  In August 2013, a military court convicted Clint, suppressing evidence and ignoring the lack of ballistic proof that American bullets had killed the riders.  They sentenced Clint to 20 years in prison, stripped him of his uniform, and carted him off in an armed van to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.

The Obama administration had an American scalp to hand to the Karzai government in Kabul and sent a chilling message to American soldiers: obey our suicidal rules of engagement, make them shoot at you first before you take a shot, or we will prosecute you, too.

I got involved as a former Navy JAG officer after writing a book on the shoot-down of Extortion 17, where 30 Americans, including SEAL Team Six members, died.  I met Pete Hegseth in 2017, when he led Concerned Veterans for America.  Five years had passed since Clint’s conviction, but Pete had never forgotten Clint’s story.

In 2018, retired Army LTC John Maher invited me to join Clint’s defense team alongside two other former JAG officers, Maj. Kevin Mikolashek and LTC David Bolgiano.  With the roadblocks presented by the Deep State inside the Pentagon, we realized that our only chance to free Clint might come through a presidential pardon from President Trump.  I reached out to Pete, who agreed that we needed to bring Clint’s case back into the spotlight so he would no longer be forgotten.  Pete said, “If you write the book, I’ll help get the case before the president.”

Working with LTC Maher and the defense team, and after a dozen trips to Leavenworth in 2018 to visit with and interview Clint, in 2019, my book, Travesty of Justice, was released.  It exposed the Obama Pentagon’s hatchet job against an American soldier.

Enter Secretary-Designate Hegseth.

With the release of Travesty of Justice, Pete Hegseth kept his word.  With the help of Sean Hannity, Pete revived Clint’s case, bringing it into the national limelight, alongside the then-current cases of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher and Green Beret Major Matt Golsteyn — three soldiers targeted under Obama’s reckless rules of engagement.  Pete used my book as a tool to advocate for Clint, and on many occasions, he delivered evidence of Clint’s innocence directly to President Trump.  On the night of November 15, 2019, after calls with President Trump and Vice President Pence to Leavenworth, Trump signed the pardon.  Clint walked out of prison, a free man, wearing his Army dress blues.

The U.S. military stands as our most cherished institution.  The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps predate the Republic, established by the Continental Congress before the Declaration of Independence and the signing of the United States Constitution.  These ragtag soldiers, sailors, and Marines won our independence and, later, defended it against tyranny.

The military is no place for social experimentation by woke bureaucrats seeking to ram liberal agendas down our soldiers’ throats.  It isn’t a place to use taxpayer money for genital mutilation or to send men wearing women’s dresses, high heels, and pantyhose into combat units to prove some sort of sick point or to celebrate drag shows on military bases in the presence of children.

The Biden and Obama administrations should be ashamed of their attempted decimation of our military.  These woke fools serving as commander in chief have allowed the military to become a playground for social experimenters.  It’s no wonder that the Army and Navy have fallen woefully short of their recruiting goals under Biden.  These recruitment shortfalls have become a national security problem.

But no more.

No, as General Colin Powell once famously said, the purpose of the Army is to break things and kill people.  Beyond that, our military’s purpose is to win America’s wars, nothing more and nothing less.

Our next secretary of defense isn’t a bureaucrat general like Lloyd Austin or a product of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about.  Pete Hegseth, a warrior’s warrior, will end CRT, DIE, forced vaccines, ridiculous pronouns, and drag show celebrations on bases with the stroke of a pen on day one.  He won’t leave anyone behind — not on his watch.

Without Pete Hegseth, Clint would still be imprisoned at Leavenworth today.  Instead, Clint graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and is dedicating his life to defending others wronged by the military justice system.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning,” the Psalmist wrote.  With Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense, joy has returned to our fighting forces, bringing a new dawn of hope and optimism for America’s military.

Pete Hegseth embodies the spirit of a lion-hearted warrior, a soldier’s soldier, a direct inheritor of the blood shed by those who fought and died for our freedom.  I know the man and have worked with him.  He stands poised to become the greatest secretary of defense in American history, leading with conviction, courage, and an unwavering commitment to the men and women who serve in uniform.

With Pete’s nomination, the president has hit a grand slam, and our military will be much stronger for it.

Don Brown is a former U.S. Navy JAG officer, Republican congressional candidate, military prosecutor, and special assistant U.S. attorney.  He is the author of several books, including Kangaroo Court: How Dirty Prosecutors and Sleazy Lawyers Destroy Political Opponents, Attack Free Speech, and Subvert the Constitution.  He served as one of four former JAG officers who worked alongside defense secretary–designate Pete Hegseth to secure a pardon from President Trump for Army lieutenant Clint Lorance, an 82nd Airborne paratrooper wrongly imprisoned under Obama’s restrictive rules of engagement.  Follow him on Twitter @donbrownbooks.

Image: Pete Hegseth.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.