Defenders of Navy Special Warfare Chief Edward Gallagher refer to him as a legend within the SEAL community, a master warrior who is being unfairly accused by an overzealous prosecution team of the murder of an injured Islamic State fighter. Detractors say he is a disgrace to the Navy, a war criminal who brings shame to the force. Both are watching carefully as President Trump considers him for a pardon.
Gallagher stands accused of stabbing the injured fighter to death while deployed to Iraq in 2017. The Navy has charged him with murder, but his defenders say Gallagher, a trained combat medic, provided aid to the fighter after he was brought on base.
“When I heard about it first, I said, ‘That’s impossible, it’s outright stupid. It’s going to go away.’ Well, it didn’t,” Thomas “Drago” Dzieran, a former Navy SEAL, told the Washington Examiner. “And then when I started looking at what they did to Chief Gallagher, my whole memories from the Communist gulag, from Communist political prison, came back to me.”
Before he embarked on a 20-year SEAL career, Dzieran spent nearly two years in prison for engaging in political activism against the Communist regime in Poland. He told the Washington Examiner he believes the tactics being used by the prosecution against Gallagher mirror what happened to him in the Soviet era. It’s a common refrain from Gallagher’s defenders, who have blamed prosecutors of everything from traumatizing Gallagher’s young sons by pulling them out of their house at gunpoint to embedding tracking software in email correspondence with his defense team.
“I said I cannot sit on the sidelines, I need to take [a stand] and bring it up. What they do is not right,” said Dzieran.
The SEAL community is famously close knit. Members are known to defend one another to the death, but some of Gallagher’s accusers are SEALs who knew him firsthand. In addition to the killing of the injured fighter, Gallagher has been accused of a bevy of war crimes. Fellow SEALs say he bragged about killing four and as many as 200 people on a deployment, according to the Navy Times. Other reports state that he shot a young girl and old man from a sniper’s roost.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, a former SEAL who lost an eye in combat, said Trump should hold off on a pardon.
“These cases should be decided by the courts, where the entirety of the evidence can be viewed,” Crenshaw said in a statement to National Review. “Only after that should a pardon be considered.”
Retired Adm. William McRaven, a former SEAL who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, expressed dismay about Trump’s involvement in the case.
“First, I am concerned about the president’s signaling how he thinks an investigation or a trial ought to go. And what the outcome of that ought to be. That is considered undue influence. We’re very, very sensitive of that,” McRaven said during an interview on CNN Thursday. “It is against the uniform code for a senior commander to imply or telegraph to a … commander who has a responsibility over an investigation that he thinks it ought to come out a certain way.”
But concerns about undue influence are why some of Gallagher’s supporters want to see him pardoned. Many of them believe it would be impossible for him to get a fair trial in the high-profile case.
“They [the prosecution] have been unethical in the treatment, charges, and control of evidence against Eddie from day one,” former Navy SEAL Brad Bailey told the Washington Examiner.
Bailey is the president of the board of directors for the Navy SEALs Fund, which has provided financial support for Gallagher’s defense. Thus far, it has raised $620,000, mostly from small donations from supporters across the country. Bailey said other charities refused to get involved.
“Regardless of the outcome, we want to make sure he was treated fairly, but we also believed in his innocence,” Bailey said.
Trump will reportedly make a decision on whether to pardon Gallagher by Memorial Day. If he decides against it, Gallagher’s trial will start May 28.
