Posted on 08/01/2019 11:19:00 AM PDT by Baynative
President Trump said Wednesday that he would order the Navy to rescind medals given to military lawyers who prosecuted a former Navy SEAL the president supported during his court martial on murder charges.
“The Prosecutors who lost the case against SEAL Eddie Gallagher (who I released from solitary confinement so he could fight his case properly), were ridiculously given a Navy Achievement Medal,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
“I have directed the Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer & Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson to immediately withdraw and rescind the awards,” Trump continued.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
As a vet, I disagree, sometimes retards need to be called out. It’s good for overall morale to know someone up top actually cares.
Interesting...one of the defense lawyers is a personal attny of Trump.
This month in San Diego, Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher’s defense team exposed tons of prosecutorial corruption, revealing that Navy prosecutors spied on defense lawyers. (Gallagher is on trial for the “murder” of an Islamic State terrorist.) They made a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. Defense attorney Tim Parlatore also exposed Navy criminal investigators in the process.
When hauled before the military judge to explain the alleged spying, three Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agents retreated like cowards and refused to testify. Imagine that! criminal investigators sworn to uphold the Constitution decided to hide behind the Fifth Amendment to cover their own tracks. -——
Don Brown: It’s time for Trump to clean out corruption in the military justice system
Fox News ^ | June 14, 2019 | Don Brown
Convicted isn’t the standard for removing the “Just following orders” excuse.
Washington would have got the bastard in stocks and personally kicked his ass for 12 hours.
I wish Trump would too
Your considered opinion notwithstanding. It’s exactly the same thing but to a vastly reduced degree. They knowingly violated his rights. They could have stopped violating his rights. They chose not to.
That is exactly the way I see it.
President Trump is sending a signal, loud and clear, IMO.
He may be outlandish and bombastic at times, but I believe that he acts in such a fashion for specific reasons, and those reasons seem to me to be “what’s needed”.
A breath of fresh air, IMO.
MORE WINNING!!! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP! (Yeah, know I’m shouting, but this deserves a shout. Knew people who knew the wrongfully prosecuted SEAL.)
You are missing something: military lawyers on the prosecution side are like any other prosecutors: they have prosecutorial discretion. In other words, they can essentially say “this case stinks, we are not going to prosecute.” (The story is a little different for defense lawyers. Won’t get into that here.)
He doesn’t have the authority to demote an officer except in a grade determination when the officer is discharged or retires. A former USAF TJAG went from 2 stars to Colonel when he was forced to retire. It happens, but not often. It’s the last rank at which the officer served honorably. Another USAF JAG fast-burner O6 who neglected to inform the Corps that he had been disbarred right before coming on active duty retired as a 2LT after 20 years of service.
Colonel, USAF (ret)
Back when I was a relatively new enlisted troop on Missile Combat Crew we had a really bad emergency out in the Silo Equipment Area. The air conditioner that cooled the guidance system caught on fire and it was so hot the metal cabinet on the AC was melting.
Since we were 40 feet underground and locked behind all those blast doors my facilities technician (the other enlisted man on the crew) and I were able to get the fire out.
Our four-man crew were put in for AFCM's but someone up at SAC HQ decided that us enlisted, the ones who actually put our lives on the line and fought the fire, were to only get AFAM's. We were told our Wing Commander had a fit and made some calls to HQ SAC and did some serious yelling. We were all awarded the AFCM.
Although I spent most of my USAF career on the pointy end of our nuclear spear I totally agree with you.
This was done out in the open so that not only the entire military establishment, but the entire Nation is put on notice that justice and fairness will be the main consideration for prosecutions. No more destroying the lives of innocent war fighters to advance the career of REMFs.
Give us some hints ... ;>)
BINGO. Let me tell you a short story just about just that. When I was chief of military justice at an USAF base in TX many years ago, we prosecuted a senior NCO who shipped back a lot of military equipment from his unit that he had been deployed to in the Desert. Stuff like a few dozen multiplier tools, bayonets and the like, nothing huge. It got flagged by customs.
His story was that the unit in the Gulf had more of this stuff than it could ever use, but his police unit stateside was woefully short on them and having trouble getting the stuff, so he was shipping it back with the intent to give out to members of his unit at our base. (He was a supply NCO among other things at that unit).
Of course it sounded self-serving, and of course he had no evidence to corroborate the story. We preferred court-martial charges.
As his case got ready for trial, word finally started getting around his security police community about his trial. Then, literally a couple of days before trial, two other police troops from a different base contacted us. They had been deployed with him, and they remembered conversations with him out there on more than one occasion when he told them that he was going to send some of these "excess supplies" back to his home unit.
Well, this was a year later, he had forgotten the conversatiosn himself by the time the whole thing came to light, so he had never given us their names.
Now - to be clear - he did NOT have authority to ship these supplies back to his home unit. But these 'out of the blue' alibi witnesses basically blew our intent to steal element out of the water.
Instead of going through with the trial (we could have gotten him on a lesser charge even if these witnesses were believed), my Staff Judge Advocate and I went to the 2-star Convening Authority and asked him to dismiss the charges, because had we heard these witnesses before the process got started, we would never have recommended a court-martial be convened (he might have gotten a Letter of Reprimand or less).
The easy way would have been to just go through with it, and risk saddling an otherwise spotless 20-year NCO with a federal conviction.
The RIGHT thing to do was was to make sure it was as if it "never happened".
The general dismissed the charges as we recommended, and I personally apologized to the NCO about the putting him through the whole thing - on my own initiative - because he had served in the first Gulf War and had a spotless record.
THAT story is my example of how the military justice system, when followed, is MORE just than its civilian counterpart.
That is the 'other side of the story', but like all such stories, the final outcome in such an unclear case will largely depend on the character of the officers involved. My 0-6 boss SJA was highly attuned to justice and had no need of convincing to do the right thing.
Sadly, I can't say that about every senior JAG officer I worked with.
That we can agree on. The President should demand their resignations immediately as well as their commanding officers reprimanded. But this hasn’t happened. Nor have any criminal charges been filed against these officers. The revocation of an award that’s at most laughable to a large contingent of service members does absolutely nothing. If they did something the President didn’t agree with (I as well) then don’t take your damn dirt public is all I am saying. If what they did is a egregious enough to publicly shame members in uniform then demand their damned resignations already and get it over with. The tweet, twit, twat, public shame game against active duty military members serves no purpose than to stir up some cheers. This Marine isn’t cheering. In fact this Marine is disgusted. You discipline a member of the military under the UCMJ and be quiet about it. You then move on.
A CinC demands an Officer who has disgraced his uniform or service tender his resignation immediately. That is how a CinC deals with matters in the military. You do not name and shame publicly a military service member not convicted of a crime. You just don’t do it. This isn’t the political arena this is his and our volunteer military.
Don’t want him there? Fire him! That’s your damned job!
“Thank God Trump isn’t a lawyer!”
A yuge reason he both succeeds, and is the enemy of the Deep State.
Now to get many more non-lawyers in DC...
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