Prosecutors in the trial of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher put on a “star witness” who “basically got on the stand and confessed to the murder of the ISIS terrorist,” said former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, an adviser to the Gallagher family, in a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Gallagher is on trial for murder of a wounded ISIS terrorist following a 2017 engagement in Mosul, Iraq. Closing arguments were made on Monday morning in a San Diego courtroom.
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Accusations against Gallagher were rooted in animus among some of the latter’s subordinates, according to Kerik. Gallagher operated as a team leader in Iraq.
“A small group of platoon members who I’d like to call a group millennial mutineers … despised him,” said Kerik. “They didn’t like his tattoos. They didn’t like his aggression. They didn’t like his assertive nature in the field, and they wanted him — basically — destroyed. They came up with a whole bunch of complaints against him, and when none of that stuff worked over about a nine-month to a one-year period, they went to the authorities and said, ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, he stabbed an ISIS prisoner.'”
Corey Scott, a Navy SEAL medic under Gallagher’s command, testified under oath that he killed the severely wounded ISIS terrorist as an act of mercy by blocking the latter’s breathing tube.
“The prosecutors put on a star witness who basically got on the stand and confessed to the murder of the ISIS terrorist,” explained Kerik. “At that point, this trial should have ended. It should have ended, realistically, before that. The government spied on defense attorneys. The government was engaged in misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, the suppression of evidence, suppression of Brady material, suppression of exculpatory material.”
“Corey Scott was interviewed five times — maybe six times — between the prosecutors and the NCIS investigators,” remarked Kerik. “Every time he was interviewed, he told them — including on the stand, under direct examination — that this terrorist had asphyxiated. He died from asphyxiation.”
Kerik continued, “Normally, your next question would be: What does that mean? How did he stop breathing? That wasn’t their question. They were so fixated on Chief Gallagher, they didn’t ask him that question. They didn’t ask him in prep, and they didn’t ask him in the courtroom under direct examination.”
Scott said military investigators and lawyers never asked him “the obvious question” of what had killed the ISIS terrorist, according to a New York Times report.
According to Kerik, Scott testified, “I took my hand, I cupped it over the breathing tube on the trach of the neck, and I stopped the airway, basically killing him.”
“When [defense counsel] Tim Parlatore asked [Corey Scott], ‘Why did you do this?’, his answer was pretty clear,” recalled Kerik, who said he had been in courtroom every day since the trial began. “[Corey Scott] said he was going to die anyway. He was bleeding out. He had blast-lung. He had been shot by the ERD [Emergency Response Division], the Iraqis. He was the target of a missile strike on a building that gave him blast-lung. He was worked on for about 20 minutes. He had a needle decompression. He had a chest tube. He had a crike in the neck. He was shot, and Corey Scott basically said, ‘He was dying.’ He was going to die.”
Kerik continued, “Corey Scott said this … if [the ISIS terrorist] survived, if they were able to stabilize him — when they turned him back over to the Iraqis — the Iraqis would have tortured him and killed him. I guess in Corey Scott’s mind, that’s why he did what he did.”
Kerik added, “Here’s the government’s problem — the prosecutor’s problem — they have their own forensic expert who could not determine the cause of death, did not see a stab wound, couldn’t identify the cause of death, couldn’t tell what the cause of death was, and this is their expert.”
Kerik went on, “Our expert said the same thing. But at the end of the day when you have a case like this, when you have an allegation and there’s nobody to look at, there’s no blood; one of these young SEALs basically said he was stabbed, and the blood gushed out. Well, guess what? There was no blood on Gallagher’s uniform. There was no blood on his shirt, no blood on his hands, no blood on the knife, no blood on the inside of the sheath where the knife went back into on his uniform. Nothing matched up to the story that was told in questioning and in the courtroom itself.”
“The entire case, in my opinion, is a travesty of justice,” determined Kerik. “I think it’s horrendous that we’re still talking about this [and] still going forward, given all the misconduct and all the things that have happened in this case. I’m just praying for the family and for Eddie … and his wife, Andrea.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
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