A new video shows the confidential testimony of Navy SEALs who reported fellow SEAL Eddie Gallagher for alleged war crimes.
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Craig Miller said in the video obtained by the New York Times. Miller said he was “broken up about” turning in Gallagher and that it was his first time reporting someone.
Gallagher was acquitted in July of murder and attempted murder, but he was found guilty of taking a picture unlawfully with a corpse. He had been accused of killing an injured teenage ISIS fighter along with shooting at civilians in 2017 in Iraq.
The trove of information obtained by the paper contained dozens of hours of video from the interviews, along with thousands of text messages. Video of the moments before Gallagher stabbed an ISIS fighter was also included.
“I was listening to it, and I was just thinking, like, this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Miller said about Gallagher killing and then posing with the dead ISIS fighter. “I think Eddie was proud of it, and that was, like, part of it for him.”
“You could tell he was perfectly OK with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott, a medic, said in an interview. Another SEAL said Gallagher intentionally targeted women and children while bragging that “burqas were flying.”
“My first reaction to seeing the videos was surprise and disgust that they would make up blatant lies about me, but I quickly realized that they were scared that the truth would come out of how cowardly they acted on deployment,” Gallagher said in a statement about the released videos. “I felt sorry for them that they thought it necessary to smear my name, but they never realized what the consequences of their lies would be.”
Special Operator 1st Class Joshua Vriens described Gallagher as a “toxic” person but said he was frightened that Gallagher would sideline him from missions if he were confronted. “He’s just going to do this to a new guy who he can manipulate. So I was like, I’m going to be his right-hand man, so — so no one else got hurt,” he said. “So I worked for him, and I kept my mouth shut.”
Gallagher met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago before Christmas. “Finally got to thank the President and his amazing wife by giving them a little gift from Eddie’s deployment to Mosul,” the SEAL said in a social media post. Trump pardoned Gallagher of his conviction of posing for a picture with a dead ISIS fighter.
[Read more: ‘Not going to survive this’: Top Navy SEAL under threat after Trump’s Eddie Gallagher intervention]
