Lawyers for former Ft. Sam Houston Sgt Bowe Bergdahl today will ask the Appeals Court for the U.S. Armed Forces to dismiss charges against the accused deserter, due to comments about Bergdahl made on the Campaign trail by President Trump, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Eugene Fidell, the civilian attorney for Bergdahl, says Trump 'at least forty times' while campaigning for president made comments calling Bergdahl 'a traitor' or 'a dirty traitor' and suggested that Bergdahl should be executed, sometimes using his arms to appear that he was holding a rifle and making a shooting noise.
Bergdahl is not charged with treason, he is not facing the death penalty, and even if he were sentenced to death, the military uses lethal injection, not the firing squad, to execute condemned criminals (something that hasn't happened since 1961).
Fidell even has a lengthy video to show the court which is a series of comments being made by Trump about Bergdahl.
He says its one thing for a candidate to make comments like this, but for the commander in chief to have made them amounts to 'unlawful command interference,' something which is specifically forbidden under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Since members of the armed forces are duty bound to honor the legal orders of their superiors, the framers of the UCMJ were very concerned about the possibility that a general could 'order' a colonel who heads a court martial panel to find a defendant guilty.
The trial judge at Ft. Bragg North Carolina has rejected Fidell's argument.
Bergdahl is charged with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy for deserting his forward post in Afghanistan in 2009, allegedly because he felt that the search would lead to questions being raised about what Bergdahl felt was a lack of quality leadership in his unit.
He was captured by an offshoot of the Taliban and held in custody for five years before being traded for five 'high level' Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Bergdahl was returned to SAMMC for treatment in 2014. His court martial, if the charges are allowed to stand, is set to begin in April at Ft. Bragg.