“The case of Eddie Gallagher has dragged on for months and has distracted too many. It must end,” Esper said Monday. “Eddie Gallagher will retain his Trident as the Commander in Chief directed and will retire at the end of this month.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper spoke with reporters at the Pentagon on Monday explaining that he was ordered to let Chief Gallagher keep his Pin. He also made it clear that the firing of the Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was a different issue and solely due to his lack of candor.
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Secretary Esper also said that at this point, the review of Eddie Gallagher as a Navy SEAL cannot go forward because of the chaos surrounding the issue.
EDDIE GALLAGHER KEEPS HIS TRIDENT PIN BUT THE FIRING HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT
“Contrary to the narrative that some want to put forward in the media, this dismissal is not about Eddie Gallagher, it’s about Secretary Spencer and the chain of command,” Esper said Monday.
Esper said he spoke to Trump “once or twice on Saturday” and been in contact with other military leaders, including the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley.
“I recall for certain on Sunday when I talked to the President to update him on the situation where he said, ‘what about the pin, I want Eddie’s’ — he wanted Eddie Gallagher’s pin restored and I said, ‘Roger, I got it.’ ”
“He gave me the order,” Esper told reporters at the Pentagon.
Esper said in his Sunday statement that he had asked Spencer to resign because he had lost “trust and confidence in him regarding his lack of candor” after he discovered that Spencer had been working on a “secret agreement with the White House,” according to a senior defense official.
The President told Milley that Spencer came to him with a proposition to allow the review to go forward in exchange for the review board definitely finding that Chief Eddie Gallagher could keep his Trident Pin. [Ugh!]
“Chairman Milley and I were completely caught off guard by this information and realized that it had undermined everything we’ve been discussing with the president,” Esper said.
Esper and Milley had asked the President to let the review go forward.
For his part, the former Navy Secretary used his resignation/termination letter to suggest that Trump is undermining the “key principle of good order and discipline” of the U.S. military by intervening in Gallagher’s case.
A REVIEW WOULD NOT HAVE WORKED AT THIS POINT
On Monday, Esper basically said that Gallagher’s case had become so fraught that any decision about it would come in for criticism. The defense secretary said he wanted the Navy to move on.
No matter what they decided, Esper said, “they would be criticized from many sides, which would further drag this issue on, dividing the institution. I want the SEALs and the Navy to move beyond this now and get fully focused on their warfighting mission.”
RICHARD SPENCER LIED, THE MEDIA TOLD THE TRUTH
Media on Saturday reported that Spencer was threatening to resign if Gallagher was not put through a review board process to determine whether he should remain a Navy SEAL.
The former Navy secretary shot down those reports Saturday on Twitter, saying he never threated to resign.
Esper stated Monday that Spencer did tell him that he likely was going to resign if forced to make Gallagher keep the Trident pin.
“It was conveyed to me — I had every reason to believe that he was going to resign, that it was a threat to resign,” he said.
Spencer’s contradictory statements in public and in private and in his acknowledgement-of-termination letter baffled Esper.
“This is my issue with trust and confidence. I cannot reconcile the personal statements with the public statements with the written word. And that’s why I lost trust and confidence,” Esper said.
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