PolitiFact Quotes Professor Larson on Trump Claims About Democrats' Video

Professor Carlton F.W. Larson spoke to PolitiFact on Nov. 20 about President Donald Trump’s assertion on Truth Social that Democratic lawmakers committed sedition with a video urging U.S. service members to ignore illegal orders.

Larson said the seditious conspiracy statute likely would not apply to comments in the video, which features Sens. Marky Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and other military or intelligence service veterans.  

The law "requires an agreement to commit certain unlawful actions," Larson told PolitiFact.  "Encouraging the military not to obey unlawful orders is not an agreement under the seditious conspiracy statute."

Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law Carlton Larson's research interests focus on constitutional law and legal history. One of the nation’s leading authorities on the law of treason, Larson is the author of the ABA Silver Gavel Award finalist books The Trials of Allegiance: Treason, Juries, and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019) and On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020).

His next book, One Nation Under Law: The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence, will be released in 2026 by Cambridge University Press.