The family of Eddie Gallagher, the decorated Navy SEAL veteran of eight combat tours currently facing war crimes charges over allegations that members of Congress say video proves untrue, is speaking out this Memorial Day weekend about the “terror” Navy prosecutors have put them through.
“We’ve gone through eight deployments as a family, raising three children and really sacrificing my husband to the war on terror was our goal of achieving victory over what happened on 9/11,” Andrea Gallagher said in a Breitbart News radio exclusive hourlong special on her husband’s story that aired on Saturday and Sunday this weekend.
“Over the years, we let him go time and time again. Never in a million years would I have foreseen that on his very last combat trip, which was to Mosul where he was previously awarded number one chief and number one platoon, he was tasked with clearing Mosul of ISIS, which he succeeded in, and then over a year later he would come back to a disgruntled group of individuals who, once they found out he was yet again being elevated for his twilight tour to a very coveted billet where he would be training every Navy SEAL on the West Coast, and once they found out they were going to be under him again, they set up a plot to take him down. Now, it never would have occurred to them, I don’t think, that it could have gone this far,” she said.
Now, Andrea Gallagher says her family has been put through a “horrific nightmare” that she called “domestic terror” at the hands of NCIS Naval prosecutors who brought war crimes charges against her husband and for which he has been awaiting trial.
“But our family has been entrapped in what I can only call a horrific nightmare, and it definitely has been encompassed by some domestic terror unleashed on our family by NCIS who picked up the case in April of 2018,” she said. “They raided our home, pulled out our kids at gunpoint into the streets in their underwear by June. So, less than 60 days on basically just rumors, lies, and hearsay is how they cobbled together this case. Ever since, we have suffered. My husband was taken out of a TBI clinic on 9/11. He was thrown in jail and he actually was in jail for seven and a half months before President Trump intervened in March.”
Gallagher is charged with killing an ISIS fighter while deployed in Iraq during President Donald Trump’s administration—even though there is video, according to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and the Gallager family, that proves Gallagher was actually trying to save the life of the fighter after all of his ISIS comrades in a facility were killed by a U.S.-launched hellfire missile.
“I always like to remind people of the absurdity of the premise,” Sean Gallager, Eddie’s brother, said on the Breitbart News radio Memorial Day weekend special. “Eddie is a Navy SEAL, eight combat tours over there, fighting ISIS—a just relentlessly brutal enemy. They shell a compound, they found out where these guys were hiding in Iraq. Mosul is a pretty densely urban city. It’s pretty hard to find out where everybody’s hiding. They found them, they hellfire missile the compound, a ton of them die. Reports are anywhere from 30 to 50 ISIS fighters died immediately from the hellfire missile. One survives. It’s a 17-year-old. Iraqi special forces were actually the first ones on the scene. They get the 17-year-old, they interview him actually—there’s an Iraqi journalist with them—this kid is severely injured. He had a severed artery in his left leg, he has what they call ‘blast lung,’ so basically a punctured lung after you’re in a compound hit by a missile. They interview him. He admits that he’s ISIS. He admits that he joined. He tells everybody why he joined. The Iraqis then drag him to the streets and they have him for two hours, pretty much, after the shelling. They bring him into the Navy SEAL compound. So this guy has been shelled, he’s severely wounded if not mortally wounded. The first one to render medical aid to an ISIS fighter who just hours before was trying to kill Eddie and his men was Eddie. So I always like to tell people the premise. The premise is that my brother, a decorated Navy SEAL, someone who was trained to fight and kill the enemy, almost does—right? They almost killed all of the enemy. All but one died. They bring him into a compound and then instead of killing him, my brother actually tries to save him. Not because he likes him, not because he’s compassionate, but because it’s tactically smart. They find one ISIS fighter alive, they try to revive and resuscitate him so they can grab valuable intelligence out of him later. So he’s sitting there, and there’s video. This is what Andrea and Eddie and I have been fighting against since day one.”
Sean Gallagher added that the government had this exonerating video when it brought the charges against Eddie to begin with, and did it anyway.
“What I always say about this is it’s not spin, it’s not context, it’s not anything—it’s just video,” Sean Gallagher said. “You can see exactly what happened. What happened is Eddie is providing medical care. He’s triaging this ISIS fighter. He flips him over. Members of Congress described the content where it’s a very kinetic compound, everybody is moving around. Eddie cuts the pants away from the ISIS fighter to begin bandaging the wound and that’s where the video subsides. This is one of those things that there is a video out there that clearly shows Eddie providing medical care. Prosecutors have had this, the government has had this from day one. They knew that this existed and yet they went forward with this anyway.”
LISTEN TO FULL ANDREA AND SEAN GALLAGHER INTERVIEW ON BREITBART NEWS RADIO:
In his own interview on the Breitbart News Memorial Day weekend radio special, Rep. Hunter explained it even further.
“There’s actually two videos. The Iraqi military shot this ISIS fighter as he came out of the building. He was the lone survivor, as you said,” Hunter, a GOP congressman who represents the San Diego area and himself served in the Marines, said. “Of the 50 ISIS fighters killed, this guy walks out of the building with a gun and the Iraqis shoot him in the inner leg and take his gun from him. Then the Iraqis interrogate him. We have that video too. We don’t know how long passed between the Iraqi interrogation of the ISIS fighter, but they interviewed him and that was on Iraqi national television—them interviewing the ISIS fighter. The ISIS fighter admits he is an ISIS fighter. Then some indeterminable amount of time later, the Iraqis pass this guy over to the Navy SEALs who then try to save his life. We’re looking at possibly hours in between the actual bombing and the U.S. Navy SEALs trying to render medical aid and save this guy’s life. So here’s what we have. You have that video. Then you have the body camera, the helmet cam videos and pictures of Eddie Gallagher receiving the ISIS guy, the ISIS fighter saying, ‘I’ll take care of him,’ they drop him down, Eddie then goes to work on his pants and rips his pants open where he was shot in the leg. That’s what the video shows. You then have pictures and you can’t tell when the guy died, but we have pictures of a tracheotomy—that’s when you try to open up someone’s airway by putting a tube down their throat basically. And we also have pictures of them trying to, it’s some medical procedure where you open up the lungs and the ribcage—this ISIS fighter had needles in both sides of his ribs where the SEALs tried to perform aid. There were two other SEALs performing this medical treatment with Eddie Gallagher at the same time. That’s what the video shows and the pictures show the Navy SEALs doing their job and trying to save the ISIS terrorist’s life.”
LISTEN TO FULL INTERVIEW WITH REP. DUNCAN HUNTER (R-CA) ON BREITBART NEWS RADIO:
Retired Navy Lt. Commander Ed Hiner, who served with the SEALs, said in his own interview on Breitbart News radio for the Memorial Day weekend special that the bureaucrats in the military are out of touch.
“To me, they’re detached from the actual reality that we’re in combat—that we’re in war,” Hiner said. “It’s been going on since 9/11. These guys are incentivized—these prosecution teams—they’re incentivized to get convictions, not justice. Convictions. To them, they’re chomping at the bit to put this man in jail because it’s a career-maker. If these guys get a prosecution, it’s the first time a Navy SEAL has been prosecuted successfully for a war crime. To them, that’s a big straw in their hat. That’s why if you look, and I’ve been to the hearings and paid attention here, I bet they have 30 to 40 people on their prosecution team doing research and conducting interviews. They are intentionally trying to drown the defense with paperwork. Thousands and thousands of papers, it’s unbelievable. But they want a conviction, and they know that video that Congressman Duncan Hunter and the other congressmen saw exonerates him. The guy is giving medical treatment. He’s what’s called an 18 Delta Corpsman. That’s the highest level you can get in the medical field. And that’s way above a paramedic. These guys do battlefield surgeries. They know how to treat trauma wounds. That’s what Eddie was doing, and that’s why Congressman Hunter and the other congressmen are adamant about how Eddie is being railroaded.”
LISTEN TO LT. COMMANDER ED HINER’S FULL INTERVIEW ON BREITBART NEWS RADIO:
It has come out in recent weeks that the prosecution engaged in surreptitious leaks to further its narrative—again, in contravention of the evidence—prompting the judge to allow the sharing of the video with members of Congress. It has also come out that the prosecution engaged in spying on not only the defense but the media through various intelligence-gathering pieces of malicious software sent into the defense team’s and the Navy Times’ servers via emails.
The case caught President Trump’s attention, as speculation mounted ahead of Memorial Day that the president might preemptively pardon Gallagher before his trial—something Trump’s 2016 opponent, Democrat nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, ripped him for even considering. While Trump has yet to make a move on a pardon as of now, with the trial set to begin soon, including a scheduled hearing this week, the president did move to help Gallagher get into a better facility while he awaits trial. Gallagher was also reunited with his wife Andrea recently amid the speculation over the potential pardon, photos released this weekend show. It was the first time they had been together since 2017, when Gallagher was arrested.
Whatever happens next, there is a deeper narrative about political correctness in the military bureaucracy hurting the efficiency and efficacy of the U.S. military, Hunter said.
“It happens over time when you’re in an 18-year war in Afghanistan, a 16-year war in Iraq, here’s what happens,” Rep. Hunter said on Breitbart News radio. “You got about one percent of the U.S. military is actually out fighting. The other 99 percent are back here behind the gates safe and sound. That means the people that run the military right now, mostly Obama guys because the people that are in power now were put into power by him four years ago, six year ago, eight years ago, those guys are now more political—those admirals and generals—and run by the lawyers and bureaucrats, than politicians are. That’s what’s happened. You have the very few select guys who go outside the city gates and do bad things to bad people, and carry our U.S. flag to foreign soil, while the other 99 percent of folks sit back here and try to judge those fighters, those warriors who fight on our behalf—on the American people’s behalf. The people sitting back here, the bureaucrats, the lawyers, and the politicians, try to judge those warriors in the context of our freedom, safety, and security and rules of law back here at home. It’s happened over a period of time. It didn’t happen all of a sudden.”
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