Trump reverses Navy decision to oust SEAL
President Donald Trump on Thursday reversed a decision by the Navy seeking to oust a Navy SEAL, Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, from the elite commando force.
Gallagher has been at the center of a high-profile war crimes case and was granted clemency by the president Friday. He was not ified Wednesday that the Navy planned to start the process of revoking his status as a SEAL and taking away the Trident pin that symbolizes that status.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump announced on Twitter that the process would not go ahead: “The Navy will NOT be taking away War-fighter and Navy Seal Eddie Galla- gher’s Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business!”
The whipsaw reversal, after the Navy believed it had official approval to act, is the latest twist in the unusually public melee over Galla- gher, which at times has pit- ted the commander in chief directly against senior Navy leaders.
On Tuesday, multiple Navy and Defense Department officials said the Navy had cleared its plan to start the Trident revocation process with the White House, though they acknowledged the risk of seeking to punish a SEAL who counts Trump among his vocal supporters. They said they knew the president could easily reverse the decision.
The Navy’s decision to start the process to oust Gallagher and three SEAL officers who supervised him was not made in haste, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The commander of Naval Special Warfare, Rear Adm. Collin Green, discussed the matter with Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer and the chief of naval operations, Adm. Michael Gilday, and the Navy briefed Defense Secretary Mark Esper about it.
In the hours before Green issued formal notification letters to the four SEALs, two of the officials said, the Navy reached out to the White House for clearance multi- ple times.
But mixed signals and reversed decisions are not uncommon in the White House, where rival aides with opposing views, and sometimes outside influ- ences, jockey for the pres- ident’s attention.
The president announced the reversal on Twitter shortly after Gallagher’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, appeared on Fox News, framing the Navy action as one of defiance toward the president’s decision last week to restore Gallagher’s rank.
“Monday morning, the admiral comes in and says I disagree with the president, I’m going to take his Trident,” Parlatore said. “What he’s doing here is really just an effort to publicly humiliate Chief Gallagher and stick it right in the president’s eye.”
In a phone interview, Parlatore said Gallagher had been told Thursday morning that the process to revoke his Trident was still moving forward.
The war crimes case surrounding Gallagher was rooted in a 2017 deployment in Iraq, where the chief was a SEAL platoon leader. Some members of his platoon reported him to commanders, accusing him of shooting unarmed civilians, killing a wounded teenage captive with a hunting knife and other wrongdoing. He was arrested and indicted in late 2018, but his court-martial ended in July with acquittal on all but one relatively minor charge, posing for a trophy photo with the captive’s corpse.
The chief was championed by Fox News and other conservative media outlets, which implored Trump to pardon him.