Political News: Navy Lets Accused SEALs Stay In Elite Unit – NPR

Navy SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher during a recess in his trial this summer in San Diego, Calif.

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

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Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

Navy SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher during a recess in his trial this summer in San Diego, Calif.

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

“Shocking and unprecedented,” that’s how ousted Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer describes President Trump’s intervention in the Navy SEALs Trident scandal. Spencer was fired this week over the controversy.

He made his comments Wednesday in an op-ed published in The Washington Post. Spencer says Trump called him twice over the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher. Gallagher was charged with multiple crimes including killing a wounded ISIS fighter but was convicted only of a lesser offense of posing with the corpse of that captive.

President Trump ordered Gallagher moved out of the brig while awaiting trial. Later the president overturned his demotion after his conviction.

Spencer who’d been the Navy Secretary since 2017 questioned the commander in chief’s intervention in a “low-level” disciplinary action against a service member.

“The president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices,” Spencer writes in the Post.

Navy cancels review of others in war crimes case

In a new development, the Navy is canceling a review hearing for three other SEALs implicated in the Gallagher war crimes case. The move allows Lt. Jacob Portier, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Breisch and Lt. Thomas MacNeil to keep their coveted Trident pins, which symbolize their membership in the elite SEALs unit. Thomas Modly who became acting secretary of the Navy this week said in a statement that neither the Navy nor the SEALs… “deserve the continued distraction and negative attention that recent events have evoked.”

Modly’s announcement follows Trump’s declaration on Twitter that the Navy would not be taking away Gallagher’s Trident pin.

Spencer while still secretary of the Navy chose not to interp