Andrea Gallagher checked her makeup one last time and sat down in front of a green screen in a small TV studio. Her lips were a bold, glossy fuchsia, her eyelids shimmered like mother of pearl. Her highlighted blond hair was carefully styled so that it just brushed against her cheekbone. She wore a glittering necklace of gold shards that formed a collar over a fitted white dress. She was going on Fox News. And she had dressed for battle.
Andrea had conventional Fox News good looks, a conservative Christian heartland worldview, a fierce sense of loyalty to her husband, and a killer instinct. The green screen behind her appeared on camera as the skyline of Indianapolis—the capital of her home state. In front of her the silent, unblinking eye of a video camera gazed at her from a few feet away. It was December 2018. Eddie had been in prison for just over two months. She waited silently as a voice in her ear gave her a countdown. She took a breath. It was almost her time.
She heard the smooth voice of a TV host, the same voice millions of Americans were hearing at that moment as they tuned into Fox News: “From war heroes to alleged war criminals. Servicemen, warfighters under fire from the very government they agreed to serve.”
An Army veteran turned professional conservative named Pete Hegseth was live in the Fox News studios in New York City with the outrageous story of what had happened to Edward Gallagher. He had invited Andrea to appear to tell the story on Fox & Friends and show the public the searing injustice of her husband being locked up for crimes he didn’t commit.
The camera panned in on Hegseth in a sharp blue suit, white shirt, and Betsy Ross–red tie in front of a backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, his hair slicked back in a glossy wave. He was wearing a 101st Airborne Division pin. That morning he was waging his latest offensive in a personal campaign to defend troops accused of war crimes.
It was a battle he’d been fighting for months. Before officially joining the Fox News staff, he had served as an Army officer, and now he was the network’s in-house blunt-talking grunt, there to vet-splain the complexities of war to the public. “I was a platoon leader in Iraq, I stood over wounded members of the enemy,” he told viewers at one point while explaining Eddie’s case. “I’m at the point I’d rather get the information from that guy, ’cause I don’t really care if he dies.”
Despite his frank talk, Hegseth was more Ivy League than G.I. Joe. He spent four years at Princeton University. Instead of ROTC, he was deeply involved in a conservative publication called The Princeton Tory, where he penned columns on conservative talking points like support of the invasion of Iraq or how the “homosexual lifestyle” was “abnormal and immoral.” After graduating he worked at an investment bank before joining the Army Reserve. He did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, but despite his brash declarations on camera, nothing in his military record suggested he saw much combat. In Iraq he was a civil affairs officer working with local officials to restore infrastructure. In Afghanistan he taught counterinsurgency classes for Afghan officers and left the deployment early to run unsuccessfully for Senate. Despite his relatively limited military career, Hegseth had used his penchant for the conservative spotlight and ties with Fox News to become one of Donald Trump’s go-to advisors on veterans’ issues.
On Fox & Friends that morning, Hegseth wanted to probe the absurdity of charging warfighters like Eddie for killing what he called “an ISIS dirtbag.”
“Andrea, I want to go to you, wife of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher. Talk to us about his situation and what you’re facing,” Hegseth said.
Andrea took a deep breath to respond. But before she had even said a word, Hegseth had told the audience volumes with his brief introduction: wife of Navy SEAL. Nearly nine years earlier, two black helicopters had descended on a sleeping compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. After nearly a decade of searching and tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, one small group of special operators had brought the nation not just a welcome victory but vengeance. The killing launched a national love affair with the SEALs that was still going strong years later. What had once been an obscure Navy commando unit was suddenly a beloved symbol of America.
SEALs were a refreshing tonic to the never-ending wars. After years of stalemate, the American public no longer trusted its leaders when it came to the so-called war on terror. But the SEALs were different. SEALs never talked exit strategies or timetables. They just got stuff done. They were what was still admirable in America—a twenty-first-century update on the mythic cowboy hero, the nameless stranger riding in to save the day, then heading off into the sunset.
A flurry of publicity followed the bin Laden killing. Three different accounts of the mission hit the shelves. Chris Kyle’s memoir American Sniper became an instant bestseller. There were SEAL guides to fitness, diet, and even parenting. Hollywood cranked out top-grossing SEAL movies in quick succession. SEALs endorsed workout equipment and charged top dollar for executive team-building camps. They graced the covers of dozens of romance novels. America’s SEAL crush was so bad that the satirical news website Duffelblog—the military equivalent of The Onion—in 2017 ran the headline “High-Value Target Disappointed to Be Raided by Rangers Instead of Navy SEALs.”
Andrea appeared on Fox & Friends amidst this flurry of Navy SEAL worship. Before even opening her mouth she already had the advantage of one of the nation’s most beloved and trusted brands. Viewers simply had to hear she was the wife of a Navy SEAL to know that her husband was a hero.
This was not lost on Andrea. She worked as a portrait photographer, doing weddings and senior portraits, and had a side business teaching small business owners to turn their personal story into their brand. She knew she could use the power of image and story to help Eddie. She looked into the camera.
Hegseth asked how she and her SEAL husband were doing. She wanted them to know that the same corrupt establishment that had kept the nation in endless wars was now after her husband. “Our situation has been very, very dire,” she said. “My husband had been accused by malcontents in his platoon that he had done an alleged act on a dying ISIS fighter. And that opportunity was grabbed by NCIS and jumped upon to try to bag a Navy SEAL.”
Andrea’s campaign had started as a humble website called JusticeforEddie.com that she set up after Eddie was arrested. It was a way for Andrea to feel less helpless when Eddie was locked in the brig and she was thousands of miles away with three kids in Florida. She designed it herself, with a huge photo of Eddie standing at attention in the khaki service uniform of a chief, his right hand in a stiff salute above his sparkling blue eyes, the red-and-white stripes of a room-sized American flag behind him. She included a quote that reminded her of her husband: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Then she added a link for donations. She must have had a hunch how incendiary the story might be. The SEALs were already a powerful brand. Her husband’s story of a good man wronged by the system was incredible. Put together his SEAL good looks with social media’s thirst for outrage, and how could people not take notice? She soon had fifty thousand followers on Facebook.
“Chief Gallagher has been charged with mistreating an ISIS terrorist during combat operations!” she typed in a typical update on the case. “On Patriot’s Day, Sept 11th, 2018, NCIS snatched Chief Gallagher in the midst of TBI treatment, shackled him, kept him shackled in solitary confinement for 72 hrs. Chief Gallagher has been Indefinitely Detained, repeatedly denied access to medical care, and has limited access to his attorneys. If this can happen to Chief Gallagher, it can happen to anyone.”
Bito donated a Half Face Blades hatchet to auction. The family started selling “Free Eddie” T-shirts. Soon the word was out and donations were pouring in. Andrea landed a sympathetic profile of Eddie in Navy Times, which focused on his glowing résumé and the harsh conditions in the brig.
Josh Vriens read the profile when it came out and chuckled to himself. He knew Eddie wasn’t going to go down without a fight, and here it was. He was going to wage it through a proxy in the press. Smart. Unconventional. Very frogman. He sent a text to Warpinski with a link to the story, warning him that Eddie was “good at shadow campaigns” and saying, “Fox News will be next.”
He was right. Andrea, working with Eddie’s brother, Sean Gallagher, appeared on Fox News more than a dozen times between December 2018 and when Eddie went to trial in June 2019, sometimes twice in one day. While Eddie was compliantly awaiting trial in the brig, they were trying the case in the court of public opinion. And they hoped to win the support of the biggest Fox News viewer of them all, the one who had complete authority over the military and its courts: the president of the United States.
The strategy might have seemed crazy with any other commander in chief. For generations, presidents had avoided using their power to insert themselves in the low-level machinery of military order and discipline. And presidents generally only pardoned people after court cases and appeals were done. Donald Trump showed he was going to be different. He wielded the pardon like a partisan hatchet. In August 2018, just a few weeks before Eddie was arrested, Trump pardoned the longtime sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, a proudly harsh targeter of illegal immigrants and a hero of conservative media who had branded himself “America’s toughest sheriff.” A month before the pardon, he’d been convicted of contempt of court for refusing to comply with a court order to stop racial profiling against Hispanics. In pardoning Arpaio, the president thanked him for “years of admirable service to our nation” and in a tweet called him “an American patriot,” adding, “He kept Arizona safe!”
Perhaps the family realized that to the president’s base—and maybe to the president—Joe Arpaio and Eddie were cut from the same cloth: two old-school lawmen not afraid to bend the rules a little to bring the fight to a foreign enemy and make America great again. Perhaps they realized the story of a blue-eyed combat veteran jailed by his own government would prove too much to resist. Eddie was a real-life version of Rambo made for the Trump era—an elite terrorist fighter in a battle against the deep state on home soil.
Andrea was a fan of the president and knew he watched Fox & Friends religiously, sometimes live-tweeting his reactions. Going on the show was the closest thing to a direct line to the White House.
The media blitz started when Eddie’s brother, Sean, went on with Hegseth in November. Sean was in many ways the opposite of Eddie, a polished Washington lobbyist with a degree from Georgetown, but he was totally dedicated to his brother’s cause. Even though he knew of Eddie’s troubled past, he portrayed Eddie as a flawless hero and a humble civil servant who had been falsely accused. Sean always came off as sincere. And he may have been. Eddie was his only source of information for the case, and there was a good chance Sean believed what his big brother was telling him.
After Hegseth, Sean went on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio show, then Hannity’s Fox News cable show a few weeks later. The former New York City police commissioner and frequent Fox News contributor Bernard Kerik heard the family on the channel and had a phone conversation with Andrea. She told him all about the problems Eddie was having with young accusers in his platoon. Since 2001 Kerik had been a fierce antiterrorism hawk, and he was incensed that a SEAL was being charged for killing ISIS. He published an opinion piece on the conservative website Newsmax declaring that Eddie was the real victim. The SEALs who came forward, he wrote, have “engaged in a covert whining and whispering campaign in an attempt to discredit Gallagher, and divert focus away from them,” and “have since been dubbed the ‘mean girls,’ and ‘cowardly crew,’ by the SEAL community.”
For a conservative media world that often peddled racially charged grievance news to a mostly white, mostly male, mostly old audience, Eddie’s story checked all the boxes. Here was a hardworking, traditional, Christian family man accused of killing a foreign, Muslim terrorist. The conservative media got around the conundrum that siding with Eddie meant throwing several other SEALs under the bus by framing it as a generation gap problem. The old-school SEAL was just trying to do what needed to be done when he was tattled on by pouty, politically correct millennials. Now a bunch of bureaucrats was trying to bring him down. The story touched the same resentments that had mobilized millions of people to vote for Donald Trump—the sense that in America, elites, lawyers, bureaucrats, brown people, and entitled youngsters were conspiring against real working Americans with traditional values. The conservative landscape was primed to embrace Eddie before he was ever arrested. All Andrea had to do was deliver the message.
She told the story of a conspiracy of millennials over and over. Hosts not only never challenged the family on the details of the case or bothered to seek other sources, they tacitly, and sometimes not so tacitly, suggested they didn’t care if Eddie really did murder an ISIS prisoner. “Now I am going to admit my bias, I think your brother is a hero and frankly I think your brother should be given a medal,” said a host on One America News Network when introducing Sean Gallagher. “Our special operators are out there to kill the enemy.” In another interview a few weeks later, Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends asked Sean Gallagher incredulously, “It’s the battlefield. Isn’t the goal to kill ISIS?”
Military laws and professional standards, if mentioned at all, were generally dismissed with an eye roll, as if having rules in warfare was preposterously naïve.
When real journalists reported factual goings-on in the case, Andrea often attacked them. The San Diego Union-Tribune was one of the few news organizations that faithfully attended nearly every hearing. Andrea blasted the reporter—a former Navy chief—on Facebook and demanded an apology for printing “blatantly false fake news” and “salacious clickbait.”
Fawning TV spots funneled thousands of people to JusticeforEddie.com. Andrea started selling new T-shirts that read, “In a world full of Mean Girls be a Gallagher.” The family soon raised more than $500,000.
Hegseth started bringing in other families with stories like Eddie’s. Andrea appeared on Fox & Friends with the mother of Clint Lorance, an Army lieutenant turned in by his own men in 2012 for ordering the killing of three unarmed Afghan villagers. He was serving nineteen years at Fort Leavenworth. Also on the show was the wife of an Army Special Forces major named Mathew Golsteyn who was facing murder charges for killing an unarmed man he suspected was a Taliban bomb maker in Marjah, Afghanistan, in 2010.
“I’m not here to trash the Army,” Hegseth told viewers with calculated outrage. “But why do our institutions work against our warfighters as opposed to giving them the benefit of the doubt?”
“I think there’s a big difference between the actual warfighter and the people who are back here judging them in hindsight,” Golsteyn’s wife replied.
“Amen,” Hegseth said.
No one on the screen realized it, but Golsteyn was the Special Forces officer in charge of the mission at the Thunderdome—the one who quietly removed the reckless SEAL sniper who had shot the farmer and endangered his whole mission.
Hegseth asked Andrea what she’d like to say to the president, if he was watching.
“We have to really look and wake up here as to what is going on in our country,” she said. “These are atrocities being committed against our military service members, my children, my family, my husband. I would love to see the president take a good hard look at the systemic failure in all four branches of the military.”
The Gallaghers were the perfect spokespeople for the brand—always laser-focused on the message: The crime wasn’t what happened to ISIS; it was what was happening to Eddie. He had provided medical care to an ISIS prisoner who had died of unrelated combat wounds. Disgruntled SEALs abetted by corrupt NCIS agents were building a fake case. A worthless commodore was too politically correct to stop it. They all were hoping to make a career off nailing an innocent chief.
“There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that clears my brother, that exonerates him from all of these charges,” Sean told Fox News in January. Ironically, the family that was the main source of information on the case was prevented by gag order from seeing any of the evidence. In appearance after appearance, they were going largely off what Eddie and his lawyers had told them.
The family appealed directly to the president, arguing that Eddie’s problem and the president’s were one and the same. “Mr. President—you know more than most what it’s like to be on this side of the system, to have your character maligned by lesser men, to see injustice unfold before your eyes, and be told to trust the process,” Sean wrote in an opinion piece on the Fox News website in early February 2019. “The process is broken. We need your help to fix it.”
Captain Matt Rosenbloom watched the Gallagher cable spots reach millions of people week after week and felt his blood boil. The commodore swore under his breath. He paced around his office calling Gallagher a liar and a psychopath and a hopeless narcissist. He had a few words for Eddie’s wife, too. Rosenbloom had done twice as many tours as Eddie and seen twice as much action. Never heard of him? That was exactly the point. SEALs were supposed to be silent about their work. Now here was a middling chief whose family was pretending he was the greatest gift ever to the SEAL Teams.
Rosenbloom wanted to crush him like a cockroach. He wanted to show the Teams hundreds of pages of the investigation so everyone could know what he knew. He wanted to send a half dozen master chiefs in uniform to the Fox News studios to have them tell what a shitbag Eddie really was. He wanted to get up in front of every SEAL at Coronado and commend the men who came forward to shut Eddie down.
But the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which was the military’s legal rulebook, had him shackled. Every time he wanted to correct the record, his staff warned that it would be unlawful command influence. He couldn’t stick up for the guys in Alpha. That was unlawful command influence. He couldn’t correct Andrea. That was unlawful command influence. If it had been a civilian jurisdiction, he could have refuted the family’s claims on almost every point, trotting out text messages and poster-sized photos, noting that the witnesses who had come forward were some of the most respected operators in Team 7. Under the UCMJ, the Navy was afraid to say a word. Every time Rosenbloom suggested something, it was as if his staff lawyer had a shock collar on him. We can’t do that, sir, undue command influence. Over and over and over. He felt like that was all he ever heard. What about leadership? he would fire back. What about the message our silence is sending? But every time, he grudgingly bit his tongue. The only thing the Navy ever said in response to the Gallagher family media blitz was “no comment.”
Andrea kept building alliances. There were plenty of people who wanted to use a Navy SEAL to question the credibility of the legal system. In January, with six months to go before the trial, Eddie’s family joined forces with San Diego’s representative in Congress, Republican Duncan Hunter. Hunter was a former Marine who had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an artillery officer. Since getting elected in 2008, he had been the capital’s most steadfast defender of combat troops. Like Eddie, he was facing multiple felony charges. In Hunter’s case it was for covering up illegally spending $250,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses, including fancy dinners, clothes, private school, mistresses, and, famously, plane tickets for his pet rabbit. Whether Hunter saw Eddie’s case as a just cause or a welcome distraction, he went all in. He visited Eddie in confinement and appeared multiple times on TV with Andrea to defend him. “Just an awesome Navy SEAL. Scary-looking guy, when you see him. He’s the kind of guy we want out there killing people for us, killing bad guys,” Hunter said on Fox News Radio after visiting Eddie. “He shouldn’t be going to court at all for doing his job.”
Hunter circulated a letter in Congress calling for the president to release Eddie pending trial. Soon forty members signed on. In March, Hunter stood beside Andrea in front of the Capitol, flanked by several members of Congress and a poster-sized photo of Eddie.
“We need to stick by the principles of our Constitution,” Andrea announced to a small press conference. “We need to have due process. We need to have innocent until proven guilty, and I feel we have really seen the dark side I never knew existed.” Andrea then spoke directly into the camera, hoping to reach the president. “Please, Mr. President, help my husband, help our family, and please just guide this process so that we do not get made just into another statistic of unlawful overreach by the government.”
The secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, was asleep in the early hours of the morning in a room at the former Hotel Del Monte on the California coast when the phone rang.
It was March 28, 2019. The old Mission-style hotel had grand halls, ornate tiles, and dazzlingly manicured gardens. Decades earlier, it had become part of the Naval Postgraduate School campus on the edge of Monterey Bay. The secretary had given a presentation on changes to the Navy’s education program at the hotel the night before and planned to fly back to Washington in the morning. In the dark he fumbled for the phone and heard the words no top military official relishes hearing in the hours before dawn: “Please hold for the president.”
Spencer had been a helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps in the late 1970s before becoming an investment banker who sat on the boards of several veteran charities. Unlike many Trump political appointees, he was a moderate—a silver-haired member of the East Coast establishment. For years during the Obama administration he served on a board to streamline some of the military bureaucracy. He was picked to be the civilian head of the Navy not by Trump but by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. He was not an old friend of the president; in fact, he had never spoken directly to Trump before.
“Richard,” the president said as soon as he came on the line. “Get Eddie Gallagher out of solitary confinement.”
The secretary had been following Eddie’s case closely, but it took him half a second in the predawn darkness to remember who Eddie was. It was a nasty case, Spencer knew: allegations of murder, trophy photos, witness intimidation. But he saw the war crimes court-martial not as a sign of things going wrong in the Navy but of things going right. He knew about the concern in Navy Special Warfare circles of ethical drift in the ranks. Whether it stemmed from a pirate subculture or just a lack of discipline, it had to be dealt with before the SEALs went any further off course.
In the past few years, he knew, the SEALs had beefed up training in ethics and character development. Eddie was too old to receive most of the training, but the SEALs under his command were not. The fact that young SEALs had been willing to turn in a chief for doing wrong suggested that the training was working. It had to be allowed to continue to work. The court-martial needed to run its course. The SEALs had to see what happened to pirates. Now fully awake, he wondered why the president was asking to release Eddie.
“Mr. President, unless something changed in the last week, Gallagher’s in general confinement, not solitary,” Spencer said. “And it’s for the safety of the witnesses.”
“I don’t really care where he is,” the president cut in. “Have you been following Fox? They’re raking us over the coals for this. These are my voters. Just get him out.”
All winter Trump had been getting hammered in public by the investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia. Just a few days earlier, one of his closest allies, his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, had been sentenced to prison for making illegal payments to a porn star on Trump’s behalf. There were lawsuits and probes. Approval ratings were stuck around forty percent. In the Navy SEAL chief, the president may have seen a bit of his own predicament. The president, too, was being hounded by the system. If he could do little about his own plight, at least he could help Eddie. By getting him out of the brig, he could show he was supporting the troops. He could deliver something decisive that didn’t depend on approval from Congress. He could show how strong he was by standing up for a hardened warrior like Eddie. He told Spencer to make it happen.
Roger that, Spencer said. Intervening with the court-martial of an enlisted sailor was an unusual request that crossed the barrier traditionally kept between the White House and the military, but it seemed manageable. Spencer knew there were concerns about witness intimidation but figured the Navy could use GPS tracking and house arrest, or something similar, to protect witnesses while still making the president happy. And if it was a little unorthodox, President Trump was an unorthodox guy. That was why people had voted for him. On his flight back to the East Coast, Spencer tried several times to call the judge on the case, a Navy captain named Aaron Rugh, but couldn’t reach him. Spencer went to sleep that night figuring he could take care of it in the morning.
The phone rang early again the next day, right after the Gallagher family had appeared on Fox & Friends. “I thought I told you to get Gallagher out,” the president said. The tone of his voice had sharpened. Spencer started to explain that he was working on it.
“I don’t give a shit, get him out of there,” the president said. “Do I have to give you a direct order?”
Spencer said it wouldn’t be necessary, he would take care of it right away.
“Okay, I want you to call over to Pete Hegseth at Fox and tell him what you’re doing,” the president said. He hung up. A White House operator came on and explained that she was connecting the secretary to Hegseth.
Spencer was annoyed at how the president had snapped at him. He was, of course, willing to carry out the president’s wishes, but he wanted no part in whatever public relations campaign the president had cooked up with Fox News. He hung up.
Donald Trump had always been enamored of the military for the same reason he’d been enamored of the business world. He saw both as black or white, strength or weakness, winners or losers. Trump had spent his high school years at the New York Military Academy, a traditional military school with uniforms and lots of marching. He rose to the rank of captain his senior year. He inspected young cadets and issued orders. In the future president’s senior portrait from the military academy, he wore a gray uniform covered in twelve medals marking years of good conduct and academic achievement. It had a gold braid distinguishing him as the student aide-de-camp. But the uniform wasn’t his, nor were the medals. Both belonged to a friend. Trump had grabbed the friend’s uniform so he could look more important in his portrait. If you couldn’t be a winner, it was important to look like you were winning.
Trump graduated in 1964, just as the Vietnam War was ramping up, then got five deferments to avoid the military draft, including a letter from a family doctor that claimed the varsity athlete was unfit for service because of heel spurs. Vietnam was a loser war, Trump felt. Guys who got shipped over there were losers for not being clever enough to get out of it.
Vietnam became an important lesson for the future president: The country wouldn’t win unless it was willing to do whatever it took to prevail. America had been strong when he was growing up in the 1950s, he told graduating students in a speech at Lehigh University in 1988. “It was a feeling of supremacy. It really was,” he said. “I’ve known that since the Vietnam War and even a little bit before this country hasn’t had the feeling of supremacy.”
Trump initially backed the invasion of Iraq, but once it appeared to be a loser war, he abruptly changed his position. In 2006 he told Howard Stern it was “the biggest disaster ever,” adding, “It’s making Vietnam look like a good war.” It was the same problem all over again. America had pulled punches. It didn’t go in to win. On the campaign trail in 2016 Trump promised the American people he wouldn’t make the same mistake.
“You have to fight fire with fire,” he told a crowd in Ohio. America’s current rules of warfare were weak and stupid. “We have to be so strong. We have to fight so viciously and violently because we’re dealing with violent people.” He didn’t sugarcoat that he was ready to win by any means. When asked at another campaign stop whether he would approve waterboarding, he said, “I’d do much worse.” Many in the audience laughed; some clapped. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work, torture works,” he said over their applause. “We have to be very strong, we have to be very vigilant, we have to be very tough. Waterboarding is fine but it’s not nearly tough enough, okay?”
Eddie was an early believer in Trump. In May 2016 the candidate came to San Diego. As protesters clashed with police outside, Eddie stood in the crowd with his stepson and a few of his SEAL buddies holding a SEAL flag as Trump packed the stage with veterans in camouflage “Make America Great Again” hats. “We. Don’t. Win. Anymore. As a country,” Trump told the crowd, emphasizing each beat. His voice echoed through the city convention center. “We don’t win with our military, with education, with trade, with anything! We don’t win,” he said. “We are going to start winning again, big league. We’re going to win with our military. We’re going to knock the hell out of ISIS!”
That promise resonated with Eddie. Almost every year since 2001 the military had grown more careful, more conservative, more restricted. Fighters on the ground had to deal with stricter and stricter rules of engagement. Increasingly, SEALs couldn’t raid houses at night. On some missions they even had to knock at the door. The candidate was promising what Eddie likely had been waiting for, a chance to take the leash off. He was using a lot of the same words and promises as Demo Dick. It was a message that resonated across the SEALs. If you were going to win, you would have to be allowed to start killing the bad dudes that needed to die.
Three years after that San Diego rally, Eddie was facing murder charges and Trump was in the White House. When the president saw Eddie on Fox & Friends, there was the portrait of a SEAL chief who personified everything he had talked about on the campaign trail, everything he believed about Iraq and Vietnam. America could win if it wanted to win. If it wanted to win, it had to fight just as viciously as the enemy. And if it wanted to fight viciously, it needed men like Eddie.
By the end of the day, Secretary Spencer had worked out a deal for the president. The Navy would let Eddie out of the brig and confine him instead to the big Navy hospital in San Diego called Balboa. He would have a dorm-like room, as well as access to a gym, chow hall, and medical care, but would be miles away from the witnesses testifying against him and wouldn’t be able to use phones or the internet. It seemed like a good solution. The next morning, March 30, 2019, the president announced the move in a tweet: “In honor of his past service to our Country, Navy Seal #EddieGallagher will soon be moved to less restrictive confinement while he awaits his day in court. Process should move quickly! @foxandfriends.”
Eddie’s family flew to meet him in California. Andrea soon posted photos to the “Free Eddie” page of her husband in camouflage uniform hugging his child. Before long, President Trump’s sons picked up the photo and started sharing it with their followers. “Incredible picture of #NavySEAL #EddieGallagher being reunited with his son,” Eric Trump wrote on Twitter. “After eight tours of duty and a lifetime of service in unthinkable places and circumstances, I believe Eddie deserves the benefit of the doubt…this story needs more attention.”
Donald Trump Jr. replied, “I could not agree more!!!”
“Trump’s Tweeting about Eddie,” Dalton Tolbert texted to the rest of Alpha. The group text was a constant scroll of news, jokes, raw SEAL talk, and personal burns, often all rolled into one. But it was also how they kept up on news of the case. Dylan Dille read the president’s announcement from his home in Colorado and shot a text back, “I thought for sure there’d be a #meangirls somewhere in that Tweet.”
One by one, all over the country, the other guys picked up their phones and read the tweet. They had gone on to new assignments. Tolbert had made it through Green Team despite Eddie’s interference and was now part of elite classified squadrons at DEVGRU in Virginia. T. C. Byrne had been cut in the last round and was teaching new medics in Mississippi. Craig Miller had been promoted to chief and was teaching BUD/S students to scuba dive in Coronado. Dille was out of the Navy and had moved back to the mountains to start a business making combat slings for assault rifles. Josh Vriens was teaching diving, too, but knew he was getting out of the Navy and had started to think about what would be next.
The guys knew in a few months they’d have to testify. Until then, all had decided to try to put it out of their minds. Most of them had young families. That plus work was enough to worry about without dwelling on what Andrea or some congressman was saying. But they had found the Gallagher family’s Fox News campaign hard to ignore, especially the part about how the whole case was a bunch of lies made up by cowardly malcontents. That was so ridiculous it was funny. The part that wasn’t funny was that tens of thousands of people, including the president, seemed to believe it.
Vriens followed the news obsessively. He had been a regular Fox News watcher for years and suddenly was confronted with stories on his favorite channel that he knew were false. He knew they were false because, unlike Andrea, he had actually been there. He wanted to go on Fox & Friends, pull off Pete Hegseth’s little Army lapel pin, and tell him to shut the fuck up. But as an active-duty SEAL, he couldn’t do or say anything. Like the rest of the Navy, he had to keep quiet. The other guys in Alpha were the only people he felt free to talk to.
“Welp there you have it. Civilians calling us cowards and pussies,” Vriens texted the rest of Alpha after one of Sean Gallagher’s appearances on Fox News. “At some point everyone will need to start speaking up as men because one day you will have to look your kid in the eyes and teach them about right and wrong.”
Tolbert told him not to worry about it. “Fox & Friends has never been something I’ve concerned myself with,” he texted. “Once it hits NPR and Joe Rogan’s podcast and they call us pussies, maybe I’ll care…but probably not.”
Miller jumped in, too. Around the SEAL Teams, Fox News was the preferred news source. Everyone at Coronado had probably seen Andrea on TV. Online, SEAL veterans were threatening to track down members of Alpha and teach them a lesson. No one dared say anything to Miller’s face, but he suspected SEALs were calling him a rat behind his back. At Coronado, the Sheriff could feel the stares as he walked across base. All of a sudden what he had always seen as a trusted brotherhood now seemed suspicious, even dangerous. Still, he was determined to keep the platoon united and on target. As for Sean and Andrea Gallagher, he texted the guys, “We don’t have to worry about what these people say or think.”
“Yeah,” Vriens agreed. “Only about our own moral compass.”
T. C. Byrne read the texts from his new assignment in Mississippi. He had been cut from Green Team in the last few days, and at first was consumed by whether it was due to Eddie’s influence, but eventually he decided not to dwell on it since he’d never know the answer. Instead he was teaching a new generation of combat medics.
“Well said,” he texted the group. “People can think what they want.”
As Eddie sat in confinement, the guys in Alpha watched mesmerized as Andrea’s campaign to make Eddie a saint drew in more and more people. Celebrity SEALs started joining, including one of the SEALs credited with shooting Osama bin Laden, Rob O’Neill. He appeared next to Hegseth on Fox News and trashed the guys in Alpha, even though he had never met them and had no idea what had gone on in Mosul. “I personally wouldn’t testify against anybody I went into combat with, I mean it has to be something just outrageously illegal,” he said. “To see someone else on the same team testify against someone in combat I think is absolutely disgusting.”
The guys felt increasingly besieged. Many in the SEAL veteran community on Facebook were calling for their blood. The SEAL leaders were silent as stone and appeared to have abandoned them. And it felt like Andrea had convinced America that all the men in Alpha were despicable turds.
So far, no one in the media had leaked the names of the SEALs in Alpha, but the platoon suspected it was coming as the trial neared. That could mean the end of their careers and an escalation in the threats they were getting. “What a spectacle this has become. Circus,” Tolbert texted the others. “Waiting for Tucker Carlson to say a news headline like ‘Why do these Navy SEALs hate America?’ ”
Craig Miller’s alarm went off before the sun came up. He opened his eyes but didn’t move. Lately he was having trouble getting out of bed. It was the first time that had ever happened. Since high school the SEALs had been everything to him—the shining light he was always sailing toward. It was not just a selfless way to give back, it was also cool as hell. He loved the training, he loved the guys he served with. He loved the intensity of the mission. There was nothing else he wanted to be.
But Eddie had changed it all. Suddenly everything was suspect. It seemed like the nation he had vowed to serve had turned against him. Miller had encouraged the other SEALs to step up and now wondered if he had steered them into the rocks. He was confused and disillusioned and, for the first time in his life, depressed. He wished there was some way he could make it all go away. He started to have dark thoughts about ending it. It wasn’t a wish to die, really, just a wish not to have to deal with everything. He couldn’t go back. He didn’t want to go forward. There didn’t seem to be any good way out. Part of him didn’t want to be around anymore.
That morning Miller dressed in his instructor’s uniform and got in his truck to go to work. The sun was coming up as he left San Diego and steered onto the Coronado Bridge connecting the city to the thumb of land on the far side of the bay that held the SEAL base. The bridge was two miles long and rose so high that the aircraft carriers could cruise underneath. It was a beautiful part of the drive, with sailboats cutting across the sparkling Pacific and the towers of downtown rising in the distance. But the bridge also had a sad history that every SEAL commuter knew. Over the years it had attracted a steady procession of suicidal jumpers who plunged to their deaths.
When Miller was near the peak of the bridge, traffic suddenly lurched to a crawl. He craned his neck to see what was happening. An old Lexus sedan was stopped in the outside lane. An accident, Miller thought. Cars put on their blinkers and merged left to go around. As Miller approached the Lexus he steered toward the center lane, but just as he did a woman got out of the car and headed for the edge. She was young, with shoulder-length dark hair. He could see she was crying.
Maybe because of Miller’s own frame of mind that morning, he spotted what was about to happen. Within seconds he was out of his truck, jogging toward the woman. Other cars continued to pass. “Hey, are you all right?” he yelled above the traffic. She looked too upset to answer. She heaved the top of her body over the low concrete wall and was staring down at the two-hundred-foot plunge to the water, poised to go hurtling over. Miller sprinted forward, lunged, and grabbed her.
For a moment, Miller, too, was staring down into the dark waves far below. He saw the yawning space and in a flash pictured himself jumping to his death. He pictured the eternal silence that would follow: not being there to testify at Eddie’s trial, not being there for the other guys in Alpha, not being there for his family. Instinctively, a thought shot through his mind: That’s not going to be me. It immediately clarified everything for him. From that moment forward, he never had any thoughts about not being around. He was going to press on. However heavy the weight of Eddie’s case was, he wasn’t going to ring the bell.
He pulled the woman away from the ledge and held her tight. He hugged her as traffic sped by. She was still crying, still unable to speak. He held her there for a long time, until help arrived. As he did, he put his head down against hers and said, “I’m so glad you didn’t jump.”
After President Trump tweeted Eddie’s release from the brig, Eddie had three months until trial. The family didn’t slow its all-out media campaign for a second. They hit conservative radio shows, podcasts, blogs, and cable TV—anyone willing to telegraph the Gallagher story with little fact-checking. Andrea went on Fox News and erroneously said that the Navy was hiding video that clearly exonerated Eddie. A deep state conspiracy was afoot. She told the camera, “I just want to let the president know he is being lied to. There is corruption from the top down involved in this.”
In mid-May, Navy lawyers in San Diego got a sign the campaign might be working. Word came down from the White House: Draw up the paperwork and send it over. Eddie Gallagher is going to be pardoned.
The request sent shockwaves from Coronado to the Pentagon. No one in the military questioned the constitutional pardon power of the president, but to use it before evidence had been presented at trial was alarming. Disagreeing with a verdict was one thing. This was disagreeing with the idea of due process. To drop a bomb like that on the military to protect a guy like Eddie—officers up and down the Navy ranks couldn’t believe it.
As soon as Matt Rosenbloom heard about the request, he sprang into action. For months, the commodore had been pinned down by the specter of unlawful command influence and had bitten his tongue. Now the president seemed to be exerting the ultimate command influence. It made Rosenbloom sick, but there was one upside: If Eddie had his charges dropped, the commodore wouldn’t have to worry about unlawful influence anymore. The court-martial would be done, and he’d be free to do what he wanted. He called his staff into his office, leaned on his desk, and told them, succinctly, “No fucking way Gallagher’s getting out of this with his Trident.”
Memorial Day was just a few days away. Rosenbloom knew President Trump planned to make a speech on the deck of a Navy ship in Japan that morning and had a reality-television penchant for pomp and spectacle. He’s probably going to spring the announcement on deck, Rosenbloom thought. The Navy would have no choice but to comply. But Rosenbloom wasn’t going to let Eddie walk away like a hero. He told his team to draw up a plan. The moment the words of the pardon were out of the president’s mouth, Rosenbloom would sign the papers to pull Eddie’s Trident and his security clearance and kick him out of the SEALs.
Rosenbloom expected to be fired for it, but he didn’t care. It was in his authority as commander to decide who wore the Trident. Kicking Eddie out of the brotherhood was the only right thing to do. If it cost him his job, fine. He figured he was too rough-edged to be promoted to admiral anyway.
At the Pentagon, top Navy leaders were trying to discourage the president. The chief naval officer, Admiral John Richardson, asked Trump for a word. The justice process is important, Mr. President, he said. Let the Navy find the facts; let the process happen. Secretary Richard Spencer wrote a note to the president, marked “For your eyes only.” “Mr. President, you’ve done some great things, do not let the Gallagher case be a stain on your record.”
As the weekend neared, high-level military leaders and retired admirals and generals also pressed the president not to subvert the judicial process. Newspaper editorials across the country came out against it. On May 24, with the trial weeks away, the president dangled the possibility of a pardon as he left the White House to fly to Japan. “You know, we teach them how to be great fighters, and then when they fight, sometimes they get really treated very unfairly,” he told the media gathered on the White House lawn. He had not made any decisions yet, he said, but was considering pardons for two or three men, adding, “It’s a little bit controversial. It’s very possible that I’ll let the trials go on, and I’ll make my decision after the trial.”
In San Diego, prosecutors made their final preparations with witnesses, knowing that at any moment the president could pull the rug out from under them. And that wasn’t their only concern. Along with the president, conspiracy theories being spread by congressmen, intimidation of witnesses, Andrea’s public smear campaign, and SEALs Fergusoning left and right, the Navy had another pressing problem in the case: leaks.
In the nine months between when Eddie was arrested and when he went to trial, confidential material from the case had repeatedly found its way into the media. Most of the leaked material went to Navy Times, but The San Diego Union-Tribune and The New York Times also got reams of sealed documents. The judge in the case put a gag order on all evidence, but details kept spilling out.
The Navy saw the leaks as a serious problem for three reasons: First, they were a violation of privacy for Eddie. Although the prosecutors thought evidence overwhelmingly showed Eddie was a murderer and a despicable human, both had been defense attorneys before becoming prosecutors, and both had an intrinsic respect for the rights of the accused. The leaks were undercutting that. Second, the leaks threatened to taint the already small Navy jury pool, which would make finding an impartial jury that much harder. Third, the leaks were putting pressure on the SEAL witnesses from the platoon, who were getting spooked by public exposure.
In March, Navy Times got hold of confidential material that showed NCIS had seized phones from SEALs at DEVGRU to look for evidence that Eddie was trying to retaliate against Dalton Tolbert and T. C. Byrne. That day the paper ran the headline “War Crimes Case Expands to SEAL Team 6.” SEALs at DEVGRU started to look at Tolbert like a turd who had brought unwanted attention to their classified tribe. “It’s getting worse,” Tolbert texted Warpinski that day. “I know you’re not media but this is getting very ugly for me.” Tolbert implored the agent to do something.
Under pressure from the judge in the case, NCIS opened an investigation. Eddie’s lawyers repeatedly said they thought the leaks were coming from the Navy—either from high-up SEALs eager to sink Eddie or prosecutors illegally trying to present the case outside the courtroom. Agents started by closing off access to the case files to almost all Navy personnel, leaving only a small crew of NCIS agents, prosecutors, and the defense. The leaks continued. NCIS agents quietly hunted through the email traffic of the Navy staff who still had access, looking for anyone who might be forwarding documents. They checked the prosecutors, Chris Czaplak and Brian John. They found nothing. The leaks continued.
NCIS ruled out anyone inside the Navy. They were almost certain the leaks were coming from the defense side. Eddie’s lawyers had the material. So did Jake Portier’s lawyers. Brian Ferguson had access to a lot of it, too.
NCIS wanted to track all of them, but agents couldn’t monitor defense communications without a warrant. To get a warrant, they’d need some evidence. And they didn’t have any.
In early May, with about a month to go until the trial, Czaplak was at his desk in the prosecutor’s office. As usual he had on his white Navy uniform, and his white officer’s cap rested on a stack of papers. The lead NCIS agent at Naval Base San Diego came in wearing plain clothes and asked to speak to him in private. It was not Warpinski, it was his boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Curtis Evans. Czaplak closed the door.
When they were alone, Evans said NCIS leadership in Washington was breathing down his neck about the leaks, and he had come up with a plan to find the leaker. NCIS would plant some bait and wait to see who took it, then use that information to get a warrant to search phones and computers. The plan was to attach a tiny bit of tracking code on one of the case documents protected by the gag order. It was simple, free software marketers put on emails all the time to gather data about customers. The lead agent wanted Czaplak to send an email with the bait to the defense. Then NCIS would wait and watch. The bit of code attached to the document would show up as a small image of the Navy Judge Advocate General’s logo—an eagle spreading its wings over the scales of justice. The software would reveal who was looking at the document and give NCIS enough information to get a warrant. If they could find the leakers, they could charge them with contempt of court.
Czaplak was hesitant. As a former defense attorney he didn’t want to get anywhere near violating Eddie’s right to private, privileged communications with his attorneys.
Not to worry, the agent said. Czaplak would never see any of the data. Neither would Joe Warpinski or any of the agents involved in Eddie’s case. NCIS would set up a separate group of agents, called a taint team. Attorneys from the Department of Justice would handle the rest. Top NCIS leaders in Washington were on board, the agent said. It was good to go.
Czaplak thought it over. The leaks weren’t a big priority to him. Trial was less than a month away. Most of the big stuff—including nearly all of Warpinski’s investigation—had already been leaked. There wasn’t much to gain even if they caught the leaker. At the same time, the constant leaks and the contempt it showed to the legal process pissed him off. If people were breaking the rules, he wanted them called out. And if NCIS was itching to catch them, there was no reason to oppose it. Ethically he didn’t see any immediate red flags as long as no one involved in the case would ever see the surveillance data. Just to be safe, though, he told the agent he wanted to talk it over with the judge overseeing Eddie’s case.
A few days later, Evans and Czaplak went to Judge Aaron Rugh’s chambers and explained the plan. Rugh listened and nodded. He said he wanted to see in writing how the taint team would work, but other than that, he expressed no reservations. Evans and Czaplak interpreted that as permission from the judge. On May 8, 2019, NCIS embedded the code in a humdrum document and email notifying the defense lawyers about an update. That afternoon Czaplak sent out the bait.
If things had gone as planned, Czaplak would have never heard about the tracking software again. He would have gone about preparing for trial. A separate NCIS team would have watched the tracker, and eventually someone might have been charged with violating the gag order. But things didn’t go as planned.
At first, everything seemed to be working fine. The documents made their way to Brian Ferguson and to a reporter at Navy Times. But Ferguson had security settings on his Web browser that kept remotely stored images from loading. He immediately spotted that the logo was a potential tracker. He fired off an email warning Eddie’s lawyers. He sent another telling Czaplak he had spotted the link back to the NCIS server. “Just in case this is a plot to track me,” he said, “I went ahead and forwarded the logo to every reporter spy and malcontent and ne’er do well that I know.”
Eddie’s defense team went ballistic. Within hours, Ferguson and the defense attorneys in the case alerted every news organization that had been covering the case. The Navy intended the plan as a way to preserve the integrity of the judicial process. The defense said it was a corrupt conspiracy to subvert it. They claimed the government had tried to launch a “cyber-attack” against the SEAL and his defense team. Prosecutors were spying. They were using government “malware” to hack privileged, confidential communications. Eddie’s lawyers called for the whole case to be thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct.
Chris Czaplak couldn’t believe it. All he had done was press Send on an email. Now the defense was talking about trying to get him disbarred. Brian John had been completely in the dark about the plan until he saw it in the news. He was stunned. He suspected Chappy was trying to do the right thing, but the appearance was so bad. Now it was all crashing down on them on the eve of trial, and he wasn’t sure if anyone would be left standing.
Soon Andrea appeared on Fox News. Fuming, she asked, “Now the question is who is going to start investigating these investigators and prosecutors for this criminal wrongdoing?”
The host asked whether Andrea expected President Trump to intervene.
Andrea observed that he had already stepped in once. Then she said, “We now know based on everything that took place that there will have to be further intervention because this entire system and process of the UCMJ is corrupt.”
Trial was only a few days away. Judge Rugh held an emergency hearing to sort out what had happened and see if the case could go forward. In an unusual move, the judge took the stand in his own courtroom to answer defense questions about what he knew about the software plan. Later, the prosecutors watching could only surmise that the judge may have been confused about the whole plan. When asked if NCIS gave him accurate details about the plan to monitor lawyers, the permission they had to do so, and the full scope of the investigation, the judge repeatedly answered, “No, they did not.”
“I hate to say this,” Eddie’s lawyer said, “but it sounds like they committed a felony.”
He demanded the case be thrown out.
Czaplak was bewildered that blame was focusing on him. NCIS had come up with the plan. Top leadership had signed off on it. It had been briefed up to the level of the secretary of the Navy. NCIS had explained the plan to the judge. All Czaplak had done was press Send. Now the judge, the Department of Justice, and the higher-ups at NCIS were acting like it was a surprise. All the things Ferguson had warned that Navy lawyers would do to the platoon were now being done to the Navy’s own lawyer. The upper ranks were denying everything and hanging Czaplak out to dry. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but he knew it was about to get ugly.
Judge Rugh issued his ruling soon after. He said the government’s action had tainted the entire criminal case and given the public the impression that Eddie would not get a fair trial. To try to fix things, he said, he was imposing several remedies. First, he took away the harshest sentence. Eddie would no longer be eligible for life without parole. Instead, the maximum he could face was life with the possibility of parole. Second, for the trial he gave the defense two extra chances to strike jurors without cause during jury selection, allowing them a better chance to stack the panel with people they thought would be sympathetic to Eddie. Third, the judge let Eddie leave the hospital grounds and go home with his family. And the judge had one last fix: The lead prosecutor was kicked off the case.
The judge found that his court did not have the authority to decide whether the lead prosecutor had acted unethically or unlawfully, but he ruled that because Czaplak was now an interested party in the leak investigation, it created a conflict of interest with the potential to undermine Eddie’s constitutional right to a fair trial. Because of that, he was out.
Czaplak was in the middle of taking testimony from General Abbas al-Jubouri when the ruling came down. The Navy had flown the general in from Iraq for the trial, but the blow-up over the leaks had delayed things, so both sides had agreed to videotape the general’s testimony and play it for a jury later. Eddie and one of his lawyers were in the room, waiting for their turn to question the general, when the ruling came out. Eddie’s lawyer read the ruling on his phone and yelled, “Stop! You’re done!”
Czaplak paused mid-examination and looked over. It took a few seconds for the news to sink in. The case was the most important one he had ever worked on. He had been focused on it for nine months. He had interviewed and re-interviewed witnesses, pored over documents, fought off defense efforts to get testimony and evidence barred from trial. He was ready. And now he was out.
It was as if someone had pushed a button and he had dropped through a trapdoor. Brian John and the other junior prosecutors would have to muddle through alone. He felt like he had tried to make everything right, but instead he had let everybody down. He started to get angry that he was being blamed, but there was no point. There was no arguing, no second chances. A ruling was a ruling. The law was the law. Czaplak stood up, gave a half glance at the Iraqi general, who was visibly confused, and walked out of the interview, never to return. Later, in the office, he ran into John, who had already heard the news. The younger attorney looked at him and said, “I’m sorry.”
Czaplak didn’t have much more to say. He didn’t want the betrayal he was feeling to poison the prosecution team right before the big event. He knew John needed to focus. He raised his eyebrows and flashed a “What are you gonna do?” smile. There were exactly two weeks until the largest, most complex murder trial the Navy had seen in a generation. Czaplak looked at the young lieutenant who had never tried a murder. “Looks like you’re on your own.”