Two former Navy SEAL leaders filed a complaint with the Pentagon inspector general alleging they were unjustly fired from their posts partly due to a so-called “Gallagher effect” they did not address within the team.
Cmdr. Edward Mason and Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Hugh Spangler filed the complaint after Rear Adm. Collin Green, the head of the Navy’s Special Warfare Community, removed them from their posts. Green has recently come down hard on the SEALs in response to several scandals, and Mason and Spangler believe Green scapegoated in order to protect him. Officially, Green fired Mason and Spangler due to “a loss of confidence that resulted from leadership failures,” but the complaint alleges they were also fired due to what Green called the “Gallagher effect.”
This was a reference to Eddie Gallagher, a SEAL who was found not guilty of various war crimes in July. Gallagher’s trial exposed a free-wheeling culture within SEAL Team 7 that included officers drinking with their subordinates on deployment — a violation of Navy rules — and instances of team members posing for pictures with the corpse of an ISIS fighter Gallagher was accused of murdering. Gallagher was the only member of the team to be convicted of taking a picture with the body. His lawyers are currently fighting a legal battle with the Navy to determine his fate.
President Trump spoke out in support of Gallagher and the complaint cites actions by Green that “publicly undermines the President in front of the (Naval Special Warfare) community.”
“The whole Gallagher case really exposed so many problems within the Naval Special Warfare community, and especially at the senior levels,” Tim Parlatore, Gallagher’s lawyer, told the Washington Examiner. “A lot of it isn’t a direct result of Gallagher, but Gallagher pulled the string. Naval Special Warfare has operated really with some impunity for so many years, and nobody’s really looked at them or tried to hold them accountable.”
In addition to the revelations during the Gallagher trial, SEAL team members have been accused of sexual misconduct, drug use, and rampant drinking in the last several months.
Parlatore believes that Navy leadership decided to make an example of his client by “really putting their thumb on the scales” to make sure he went to prison. Instead, Parlatore believes the case exposed leadership issues to which the Navy had long turned a blind eye.
The complaint states that Mason and Spangler were treated as “expendable scapegoats” and accuse Master Chief Petty Officer William King, Green’s top enlisted advsier, of stating “that any enlisted SEAL who ‘played lawyer games’ by asserting rights provided under Navy Regulations would summarily lose their SEAL tridents.”
The idea that SEALs would be impugned for invoking their rights is “horrible,” Parlatore said. He believes Navy personnel are more likely to lawyer up and assert their rights in order to protect their reputations after witnessing the fallout from the Gallagher case. Gallagher’s legal team has accused Navy officials of using undue influence in the case proceedings. In one instance, prosecutors were discovered to have embedded email tracking software in their correspondence with the defense, which led to the dismissal of the lead prosecutor.
The complaint pushes for Green and King to undergo a polygraph examination to prove they tolerated drinking on deployment. Parlatore believes it might be a good idea if Green wants to “leader from the front.” He added: “The entire Navy needs to undergo a review of how they do business. A lot of the systems they have in place are antiquated.”
