The former lead prosecutor in the the court-martial of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher has been demoted to a desk job as the service conducts a probe of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps after its loss in the case that made national headlines.
Capt. Jennie Goldsmith, the new commander of the Navy’s southwest trial department in San Diego, on Tuesday reassigned Cmdr. Chris Czaplak to Code 67, the JAG’s technology, operations, and plans division in Washington, D.C.
Czaplak was the top Navy prosecutor in San Diego. Now he’ll be in a division mainly responsible for “program management” and “information technology (IT) resources.”
The move was made “in an effort to move the [department] forward,” Navy spokesman Cmdr. Jereal Dorsey said in a statement.
The judge overseeing Gallagher’s case removed Czaplak as prosecutor in June after his team was discovered to have embedded email tracking software in its correspondence with the defense team.
“Given his misconduct, he should have been suspended and sent to a board of inquiry to be separated,” Gallagher’s lead defense attorney Tim Parlatore told the Washington Examiner. “The JAG Corps needs to make an example of Chris Czaplak and demonstrate this type of unethical behavior will not be tolerated.”
Parlatore is pursuing an ethics complaint against Czaplak in the state of New York, where Czaplak is barred.
Gallagher was found not guilty of various war crimes in July. He was convicted on a single charge of unlawfully taking a picture with the corpse of an ISIS fighter he was accused of killing while deployed to Iraq in 2017. His sentence includes a demotion from chief petty officer to petty officer 1st class, though Navy rules dictate he could be busted down to E-1, the service’s lowest rank. Gallagher’s defense team is seeking to reverse that sentence so he can retire in a few months with full benefits.
