Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Tuesday said he disagrees with ousted Navy Secretary Richard Spencer's comments that President Donald Trump doesn't understand what it means to be a "warfighter," arguing that the president, unlike his predecessor, values the military over lawyers fighting legal cases against them.
"The president is ultimately the head of the process," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "There is a reason he is called commander-in-chief, and I think in his case, look, he is making a very clear statement to the men and women in uniform that the days of the Obama administration valuing lawyers over fighters and crippling people by their hands and giving us rules of engagement that make no sense are over, and that when we are in a war we should fight to win the war."
On Monday, Spencer told CBS Evening News while discussing his firing and the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher that Trump does not understand that a warfighter, as part of a profession of arms, "has standards that they have to be held to and they hold themselves to."
Gallagher, said Gingrich, dedicated his life to defending the United States and taking away his Trident after his conviction of posing with the corpse of an ISIS fighter would have meant he would have retired in dishonor. Gallagher had also faced war crimes charges in connection with the deaths of civilians and the killing of the ISIS fighter, but he was acquitted.
"Can we overlook this one thing because this guy gave us years of very hard service in very dangerous places?" said Gingrich. "The president wants to favor the morale of the warfighter over the morale of the bureaucrat."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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