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Navy chief fired after making private proposal to White House to restore SEAL’s rank

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A Sunday-night purge at the Pentagon just cost the Navy its top civilian leader.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper fired Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer on Sunday, November 24, after discovering Spencer had gone around him to cut a side deal with the White House over Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher. The move ends weeks of tension between the Pentagon, the White House, and Naval Special Warfare Command over how far the Trump administration would go to protect Gallagher’s status as a SEAL. Spencer is out immediately, and Esper has already killed the disciplinary board that was set to decide Gallagher’s fate.

• Esper fired Spencer for a “lack of candor” after learning Spencer secretly proposed to the White House that Gallagher be allowed to keep his Trident pin regardless of how a Navy review board ruled.
• Esper found out about the side-channel deal during a Friday conversation with White House officials, then cancelled the December 2 Trident review board and ordered Gallagher to retire with full rank.
• President Trump announced on Twitter he would nominate Kenneth Braithwaite, the U.S. ambassador to Norway and a retired rear admiral, to replace Spencer.

The Deal That Blew Up in Spencer’s Face

According to chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman, Spencer had repeatedly talked to Esper about the Gallagher case without ever mentioning that he was also negotiating directly with the White House. The arrangement Spencer floated would have let the Navy go through the motions of convening a Trident review board — the peer panel that decides whether a SEAL keeps his pin — while privately assuring the White House that Gallagher would walk away with his Trident regardless of the outcome. Esper’s statement made clear the firing wasn’t about the underlying Gallagher decision; it was about being cut out of it. “Lack of candor” was the exact phrase Hoffman used, and it’s the kind of language that ends careers at the Pentagon.

Gallagher Follows Unconventional Career Path

Gallagher was acquitted earlier in 2019 of murder and of shooting at civilians during a 2017 deployment in Iraq, but a military jury convicted him of the lesser charge of posing for photos with the corpse of an ISIS fighter, which triggered a demotion. President Trump intervened earlier in November to restore Gallagher’s rank to E-7, a decision that immediately put him at odds with the uniformed Navy. Naval Special Warfare Command responded by moving to convene the peer review board anyway, setting up exactly the standoff Spencer then tried to quietly finesse behind Esper’s back.

“I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me, in regards to the key principle of good order and discipline.”

Spencer’s Resignation Letter

Spencer didn’t fight the firing publicly — he wrote a resignation letter to Trump acknowledging his termination and framing his exit as a matter of principle rather than politics. The line about “good order and discipline” was aimed squarely at the White House’s willingness to overrule the chain of command on Gallagher’s case, a value the Navy treats as close to sacred. It read less like an apology and more like a parting shot at the arrangement he himself had proposed, once it became clear Esper wasn’t going to protect him for it.

Gallagher Faces Uncertain Professional Future

With Spencer gone, Esper moved fast: the December 2 Trident review board is cancelled, and Gallagher will retire keeping both his SEAL Trident and his E-7 rank, exactly the outcome the White House wanted all along — just without the secrecy that got Spencer fired. Trump’s pick to replace Spencer, Kenneth Braithwaite, is a retired rear admiral currently serving as ambassador to Norway, giving him both the military background and the diplomatic experience to try to smooth over a Navy leadership rattled by the whole episode.

Braithwaite now inherits a Navy where the uniformed brass and the West Wing just went to war over one chief petty officer’s Trident pin, and he’ll be confirmed knowing exactly why his predecessor lasted less than a year in the job. For readers tracking how this administration handles the military chain of command, the Gallagher case remains the clearest test case yet — and it just cost a Cabinet-level Navy secretary his job over a phone call Esper wasn’t supposed to know about.