Eddie Gallagher (Navy SEAL)

Based on Wikipedia: Eddie Gallagher (Navy SEAL)

In the summer of 2019, a military courtroom in San Diego witnessed something extraordinary: a prosecution witness, testifying under immunity, confessed to the very murder his testimony was supposed to help prove against someone else. The defendant was a Navy SEAL named Eddie Gallagher. The charge was killing a teenage prisoner of war. And the trial would become a collision point between military justice, presidential power, and the question of what happens when warriors believe they operate beyond the rules that govern the rest of us.

The Making of a Special Operator

Edward Gallagher was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1979. After graduating from Bishop Dwenger High School, he enlisted in the Navy in 1999, at the tail end of a relatively peaceful decade for American foreign policy. That would change dramatically.

Gallagher wasn't initially a SEAL. He spent years attached to a Marine Corps unit, training as a medic, a sniper, and an explosives expert. He graduated from the Marine Corps Scout Sniper school—a grueling program that produces some of the most skilled marksmen in the American military. Only in 2005 did he enroll in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, known by its acronym BUD/S (pronounced "buds"). Class 252.

BUD/S is legendary for its brutality. Roughly three-quarters of candidates don't make it through. Those who do earn the right to attend SEAL Qualification Training, after which they receive what's called a Naval Enlisted Classification code—essentially a job identifier—designating them as Combatant Swimmers. They also earn the right to wear the Special Warfare Insignia, commonly called the "Trident" for its distinctive gold anchor, eagle, and trident design.

Gallagher would go on to complete eight overseas deployments, serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was decorated multiple times for valor, including two Bronze Stars. His superiors gave him positive evaluations. He became an instructor in the BUD/S program, teaching the next generation of SEALs. By any conventional measure, he was a success story.

But there were cracks in the foundation.

A Reputation Forms

In 2010, Gallagher became the subject of an investigation into the shooting of a young girl in Afghanistan. He was cleared—but notably, the investigation was conducted by close comrades who had deployed with him. Four years later, he allegedly tried to run over a Navy police officer with his car after being detained at a traffic stop. By 2015, people within the SEAL community had developed a particular view of Gallagher: he was someone more interested in "fighting terrorists" than in complying with rules.

That phrase—"fighting terrorists"—deserves unpacking. To his defenders, it suggested a warrior focused on the mission while bureaucrats worried about paperwork. To his critics, it was a euphemism for something darker: a man who saw the enemy as less than human and believed that gave him license to operate outside the laws of armed conflict.

Gallagher went by the nickname "Blade."

Mosul, 2017

Gallagher's eighth and final deployment took him to the Battle of Mosul, the campaign to retake Iraq's second-largest city from the Islamic State. His official role was advisory—training and supporting Iraqi forces rather than conducting direct combat operations himself. But according to multiple members of his own SEAL team, Gallagher's behavior during this deployment crossed lines that even hardened special operators found disturbing.

The allegations accumulated.

Fellow snipers reported that Gallagher fired his rifle far more frequently than anyone else, taking what they called "random shots" into buildings. They didn't consider him a particularly good sniper, which made his volume of fire even more troubling. Two specific incidents stood out: allegedly shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe, and a young girl walking with other girls. Neither shooting served any military purpose.

Gallagher allegedly boasted about his body count. According to testimony, he claimed to average three kills a day over eighty days—a number so high it suggested either wild exaggeration or something close to murder. He reportedly claimed four of his victims were women. He was known, according to team members, for "indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods" with rockets and machine gun fire even when no enemy force had been identified in the area.

SEALs began reporting these concerns up the chain of command. Their reports were dismissed.

Only when the allegations reached people outside the SEAL community did anything happen. The reports were finally referred to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, known as NCIS—the same agency that inspired the long-running television drama, though the real organization investigates crimes rather than solving them in forty-two minutes with commercial breaks.

The Prisoner

The most serious allegation centered on a seventeen-year-old Islamic State fighter named Khaled Jamal Abdullah.

Abdullah had been captured by Iraqi forces and was being treated by a medic for his injuries. According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher's voice came over the radio: "He's mine." Gallagher then walked up to Abdullah and, without explanation, allegedly stabbed him repeatedly with his hunting knife.

What happened next was documented. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, posed for photographs with the body. Other SEALs were present. Gallagher then sent a text message to a friend in California—a photo of himself holding the dead teenager's head by the hair, accompanied by the words: "Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife."

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the legal framework that governs American military personnel—killing a prisoner of war is murder. Photographing yourself with a corpse is a separate offense. And threatening fellow service members to prevent them from reporting your actions is obstruction of justice.

The Prosecution's Case

Gallagher was arrested at Camp Pendleton on September 11, 2018—a date chosen with obvious symbolic weight, though whether by accident or design remains unclear. He faced charges of premeditated murder, attempted murder, obstruction of justice, and other offenses. The Navy prosecutor, Commander Christopher Czaplak, did not mince words in his characterization: "Chief Gallagher decided to act like the monster the terrorists accuse us of being. He handed ISIS propaganda manna from heaven. His actions are everything ISIS says we are."

The case faced significant obstacles from the start. The Navy had not begun a formal investigation until nearly a year after the initial reports, by which time much of the physical evidence—including the bodies of those Gallagher allegedly killed—was unrecoverable. Abdullah's family, contacted by media years after the event, said they had been unaware of how their son died and had never been contacted by prosecutors.

This left the prosecution relying primarily on eyewitness testimony from Gallagher's own teammates. The men who served alongside him. The men who had reported him.

The Defense's Strategy

Gallagher's defense team, led initially by attorney Colby Vokey and later by Phillip Stackhouse, pursued a multi-pronged approach.

First, they attacked the credibility of the witnesses. These were disgruntled SEALs, the defense argued, who couldn't meet Gallagher's demanding leadership standards. Malcontents. Weaklings who resented being held to high standards by a true warrior.

Second, they offered alternative explanations for the evidence. The text messages with the corpse photo? Dark comedy in a stressful situation. The boasts about killing twenty people a day? Clearly impossible, therefore obvious exaggeration. The stabbing? According to the defense, Gallagher stabbed a corpse—Abdullah was already dead—and then embellished the story out of "misplaced bravado."

Third, they called their own witnesses. Marine Staff Sergeant Giorgio Kirylo testified that he saw Gallagher trying to save the prisoner and observed no stab wounds on the body. Two high-ranking Iraqi Army officers testified that Abdullah was "barely alive" when he arrived—though prosecution witnesses countered that the medic who initially treated Abdullah found his leg injury not particularly serious and was surprised to find him dead later.

Fourth, the defense attacked the investigation itself. They claimed the lead NCIS agent had slanted witness statements to be more hostile to Gallagher than the actual interviews warranted.

Enter the President

Military justice operates through a chain of command, but that chain ultimately leads to the Commander in Chief. And in 2019, that meant Donald Trump.

In March, eighteen Republican members of the House of Representatives—led by Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL himself—wrote to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer asking for Gallagher's pretrial confinement to be reviewed. Two weeks later, Trump intervened directly, ordering Gallagher moved to "less restrictive confinement." The president was reportedly influenced by coverage on Fox & Friends, the morning show that served as something like a direct line to the Oval Office during the Trump administration.

Pete Hegseth, a co-host of Fox & Friends, had been advocating for Gallagher for months—though viewers watching his coverage would not have known he was simultaneously advising the president privately to pardon Gallagher. The line between journalism, advocacy, and presidential counsel had become thoroughly blurred.

Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter went further. He showed combat video footage to legislators that he said exonerated Gallagher of at least one charge, and announced he would seek a presidential pardon if Gallagher was convicted. In a podcast interview, Hunter made a remarkable admission: he himself had posed for pictures with a dead enemy combatant during his own military service, and American artillery under his command had killed "hundreds" of Iraqi civilians around Fallujah.

The prosecution was melting down through other means as well. Defense lawyers discovered that Commander Czaplak had embedded a tracking pixel—what's called a web beacon—in emails sent to both the defense team and a Navy Times reporter. Anyone who opened the email would unknowingly ping a server, revealing their location and identity. The presumed purpose: finding leakers who were violating the judge's gag order. As a remedy for this misconduct, the judge ordered Gallagher freed from prison entirely while awaiting trial and removed Czaplak from the case.

The Surprise Witness

On June 20, 2019, the prosecution's case collapsed in spectacular fashion.

Special Operator First Class Corey Scott was a medic in Gallagher's platoon. He was testifying under an immunity agreement—meaning his testimony could not be used to prosecute him. The prosecution expected Scott to confirm that Gallagher had stabbed Abdullah. And he did confirm that.

Then Scott said something no one expected.

Gallagher stabbed Abdullah, Scott testified. But Gallagher didn't kill him. Scott did. After Gallagher walked away, Scott covered Abdullah's breathing tube and asphyxiated him. Scott called it a "mercy killing." Abdullah, he explained, would have been tortured by Iraqi personnel because of his connection to the Islamic State. Death was a kindness.

Prosecutors were blindsided. Scott had never mentioned this in any previous interview with investigators. His new account contradicted the statements of at least seven other SEALs and his own prior statements. But because of the immunity agreement, Scott could not be prosecuted for what he had just confessed to on the witness stand.

The prosecution canceled their remaining witnesses, fearing additional testimony would only further damage their case.

The Verdict

The jury—five enlisted men including a Navy SEAL and four Marines, plus a Navy commander and a Marine chief warrant officer—deliberated and returned their verdict on July 2, 2019.

Not guilty of murder.

Not guilty of attempted murder.

Not guilty on six of seven charges.

Guilty only of "wrongfully posing for an unofficial picture with a human casualty."

The maximum sentence for that charge was four months. Gallagher had already served more than that during pretrial confinement. He walked free.

The jury did impose one punishment: demotion from Chief Petty Officer to Petty Officer First Class, a drop of one rank. They could have imposed harsher penalties—an Other Than Honorable discharge would have stripped Gallagher of most veterans' benefits—but they chose the lighter option.

President Trump congratulated Gallagher on Twitter. Four weeks later, he directed the Secretary of the Navy to revoke Navy Achievement Medals that had been given to members of the prosecution team.

The Aftermath

What happened to Corey Scott, the man who confessed under oath to killing Abdullah? The Chief of Naval Operations stripped prosecutors of their authority to charge him with perjury. The Navy dropped its investigation into his statements shortly after Gallagher's acquittal. Scott faced no consequences.

Gallagher's legal troubles weren't entirely over. He entered a dispute with his first attorney, Colby Vokey, over fees. According to Vokey, Gallagher hadn't paid what he owed. According to Gallagher, Vokey had performed no useful services and was bilking him. The matter went to arbitration.

The question of Gallagher's demotion wound its way up the chain of command. Such clemency requests are common after courts-martial and rarely successful, but this case had become anything but normal. Rear Admiral Bette Bolivar initially rejected the request. Then President Trump raised the issue with the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, who took personal ownership of the matter—an extraordinarily rare intervention for such a senior officer. After Richardson's retirement, his successor Admiral Michael Gilday partially granted the request, restoring Gallagher to one rank below his original position rather than the default demotion to the Navy's lowest enlisted rank. This improved Gallagher's pension and retirement benefits.

What Does It Mean?

The Gallagher case sits at the intersection of several uncomfortable questions that democracies have struggled with since they first began sending young men to kill on their behalf.

There is the question of accountability. Multiple SEALs—men who had served alongside Gallagher, men who had their own extensive combat experience—came forward to report behavior they believed crossed fundamental lines. Their reports were initially dismissed by the SEAL command structure. When the case finally went to trial, the key prosecution witness changed his story in a way that made conviction impossible. Whether Scott's courtroom confession was true, or was a last-minute attempt to save a fellow SEAL, remains genuinely unclear.

There is the question of presidential power. Trump's interventions—moving Gallagher to lighter confinement, publicly congratulating him, punishing the prosecutors—sent unmistakable signals about which side the Commander in Chief was on. Some saw this as a president standing up for a warrior unfairly persecuted by bureaucrats. Others saw it as the corruption of military justice by political interference.

There is the question of what special operations forces become when they believe they operate outside normal rules. The SEAL community has produced extraordinary acts of valor and also generated a troubling number of scandals. Some argue this is inherent to creating warriors capable of the violence their missions require. Others argue it reflects a culture that has lost its moral bearings.

And there is the question of what we ask of the young people we send to war, and what happens to them when they come home. Gallagher deployed eight times. He saw things and did things that most Americans cannot imagine. Whatever crimes he may or may not have committed, he was shaped by a system that trained him to kill and then kept sending him back to do more of it.

Eddie Gallagher retired from the Navy. He faced no prison time for any of the charges brought against him. He remains a divisive figure—hero to some, war criminal to others, symbol of something broken to nearly everyone.

The teenager he may or may not have killed, Khaled Jamal Abdullah, remains dead. His family learned the circumstances of his death from journalists, years after it happened. In the end, no one was held accountable for his killing—not Gallagher, not Scott, not anyone.

That may be the most telling detail of all.