The morning news wires are reporting that President Trump has been trying to drum up calls for a treason case against his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley. That’s because Bob Woodward’s latest book reports that the general, worried that Mr. Trump might do something rash, promised the Red Chinese that he would warn them of any pending attack. A meme of “Benedict Milley” is on the Web.

Yet it is hard to imagine that General Milley could be convicted of treason for such a call, even if Mr. Woodward’s reporting turns out to be accurate. This is because of one of our favorite facts about the Constitution. It defines treason in a narrow way and prohibits any use in our courts of a broader definition. The treason clauses reflect the wariness of the American states of the way treason law had been abused in Britain.

Treason against the United States, the Constitution itself ordains, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies. Even adhering is not enough — a traitor has to give the enemy both aid and comfort. To convict of treason, the Constitution requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same act, which must be overt. The parchment requires that any confession to treason be made in open court.

All that said, if General Milley did what Mr. Woodward reports, it is outrageous — a classic case of the way the Democrats and their useful idiots thought of themselves as wiser than the president the American people elected and sought to undermine his presidency. To actually telephone an American adversary communist regime and promise to warn it of any pending attack — what was General Milley thinking?

The general’s panic, if that’s what it was, grew, according to the Times’ account of Mr. Woodward’s soon-to-be-published tome, from American intelligence showing, in advance of the 2020 election, that, as the Times puts it, “the Chinese believed that Mr. Trump planned to launch a military strike to create an international crisis that he could claim to solve as a last-ditch effort to beat Joseph R. Biden Jr.”

General Milley, the Times relates, had become increasingly concerned about China’s growing military power and the potential for one misread move to set off combat between the world superpowers. So the Joint Chiefs chairman called General Li, his communist Chinese counterpart, on “a secret backchannel.” The aim was to assure the communist camarilla that America “was not planning to attack China.”

General Li apparently claimed that the Chinese leaders feared that, as the Times put it, “the United States government was unstable” and worried “whether the military was going to take action.” Our guess is that if General Li really believed that, it would be because the Chinese military brass knows something about their own system that we should carefully note — namely that President Xi himself is unstable enough to try something rash.

Even after the call, in the Times’ account, “General Milley concluded that the situation was ‘grave’ and General Li ‘remained unusually rattled.’” The same day, General Milley reached out to Mr. Trump’s bitterest and most hysterical political foe, Speaker Pelosi, who, the Times account says, told him: “This is bad, but who knows what he might do? He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”

The Times, which notes that General Milley is not in the chain of command, “tried to reassure Ms. Pelosi that he could stop Mr. Trump.” Where in the Constitution the general spied that authority is beyond us. At least Secretary of State Haig had, after Reagan was shot, his moment of vainglory in public. Yet he didn’t weep on the shoulder of a political foe or get on the blower to promise to warn a hostile power of our attack.

Calls are already coming for General Milley to be fired or court-martialed. It could turn out that back-channel communications between our top brass and their counterparts in other countries are more common than the public perceives — and often used to calm things down. The general might have been ordered to place his phone call to General Li. In the context of recent history, though, it looks to us as if General Milley has some explaining to do.

Among those who want General Milley fired is Senator Rubio, who, in a letter to President Biden, uses the phrase “even more egregious” to describe reports “that General Milley interfered with the procedures by which the civilian commander-in-chief can order a nuclear strike” and “purportedly instructed officials not to take orders without” General Milley’s “involvement.”

Mr. Biden would be wise to address the concerns of Mr. Rubio and others, even if they are Republicans. It’s not so hard to imagine, after all, that Mr. Biden’s own infirmities could precipitate General Milley — or his superiors — into the kind of panic that, under President Trump, caused the beribboned big shot to forget his constitutional oath. There’s a reason it is to the Constitution rather than individuals that all of our officials must be sworn.

________

Updated and expanded from the bulldog.