Iran War vs. Epstein Files
Politician whose background is secret challenges one who released Epstein files
There’s a heated primary election for Congress this Tuesday that is nothing short of a referendum on “national security.” Fittingly, one candidate’s background is almost entirely unknown because, he claims, it’s classified.
His name is Ed Gallrein, a Trump-backed retired Navy captain challenging incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The focus of Gallrein’s campaign (and one of the few things he seems willing to talk about) is his claim of having served in SEAL Team 6, the secretive commando group most famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden. He certainly knows how to operate in the shadows: I can count on one hand the number of interviews Gallrein has sat down for, and he’s skipped literally every debate, each attended alone by Massie. Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater. He’s even called civilians “sheep.”
The strategy seems to be to let Trump's endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work — and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.
“The president is playing five-dimensional chess,” Gallrein told a local NBC affiliate, in response to a question about the Iran War’s effect on gas prices last week. By the next day, the game had mushroomed to “nine-dimensional chess,” as Gallrein later described Trump’s handling of the war to commentator Mark Levin.
By contrast, Thomas Massie is a vocal critic of the national security state — and it has cost him. He voted against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill,” pushed for release of the Epstein files alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California, and has been one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the Iran War. Whatever you think of his views, he's one of the few members of our pathetic Congress who is willing to defy his own party's leadership. For that, he's been buried in out-of-state spending and made a personal target of the president.
"We'll get a 100% vote except for this guy named Thomas Massie," Trump said while promoting the Big Beautiful Bill. "There's something wrong with him." Now he has escalated to calling Massie "the worst Republican Congressman in History” and demanding his ouster.
Into this fight steps Gallrein, whose pitch beyond Trump loyalty is a story he tells repeatedly about his first visit to the Oval Office. By his account, when he arrived, Trump had a leather binder containing his complete, classified “top secret” career file sitting on the resolute desk. The lesson, Gallrein told the Maywood Country Club:
“He [Trump] knows everything about me. He knows what I did for you in uniform. He knows what I’ll do for you in Washington. I’ll be your champion.”
The message here is as insulting as it is creepy: Trump has seen the classified record, the classified record establishes fitness, therefore voters need only ratify the commander-in-chief’s decision. Voters’ job isn’t to evaluate; it’s to trust the officials who have.
Gallrein is pro-Iran War (and as far as I can tell, any other war) pro-Trump, and pro-“national security,” but that’s about all we’re allowed to know. If you’d like to know more about this figure that could well be representing the country next year, too bad. The campaign slogan might as well be Shut The Fuck Up and Salute.
He also rails against "politicians" who burned SEAL Team Six's cover by talking publicly about the bin Laden raid — but those politicians include the president and other democratically elected leaders who represent the only real check on the secret world that exists (at least in theory.)
His contempt for the public’s right to know presents itself almost like a verbal tic.
"Foreign policy and national security are inseparable,” Gallrein told a podcast called USA Cares. “You can't talk about one without talking about the other. If you are, you're an amateur."
In other words: what your government does overseas, from Gaza to Venezuela, isn’t any of the public’s business. Your only job is to perform gratitude. As Gallrein told the Optimist Club:
“You should be proud to know as Americans there’s units like Delta Force, our Army sister unit, and SEAL Team Six, that the kind of operation you saw to get Maduro, they’re standing ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for you and your family. Mercifully and fortunately, all the things they do don’t hit the press. I’m sorry to disappoint the media, but that’s what I can share with you.”
Note the framing: they work for “you and your family.” Constitutionally and legally, they work for the elected president. Gallrein knows this (or should).
If you think I'm reading too much into his paternalism toward the civilian world, he literally calling civilians “sheep” and SEALS “sheep dogs.” Per his USA Cares interview:
“I don't know if you've heard this, the famous theory there's three kinds of people in the world. There are sheep, there are sheep dogs, and there's wolves. SEALs are sheep dogs. We don't care what letter jacket the adversary wears. If they're bad people and they mean, mean harm to our sheeps, we're on it.”
Civilians are the sheep. The special operators are the sheepdog, their self-appointed protectors. The sheep don't give the sheepdog orders. This is the worldview of someone running for an elected position in which he would oversee the sheepdogs!
And as for sheepdogs, it’s not even clear how much he really was one. Military sources tell me that Gallrein not only went to the Naval Postgraduate School as a young Lieutenant, but that he served in a number of educational and training positions, including the head of instruction at the Joint Special Operations University before he retired. He stresses in interviews that SEAL Team 6 isn’t just the combat operators but support staff as well.
I wonder what his job was!
Whatever the case, he sure loves to talk like some kind of shadow warrior. In fact, in just the few interviews he’s even done, I counted at least a dozen references to secrets he claims he’s not at liberty to divulge, including:
“I can’t speak to any classified operations I may or may not have ever been involved in.” — The Mark Levin Show
“SEAL Team six is different, classified, won’t go into it...” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“Let’s talk about Seal Team Six for a minute. This is all I can tell you.” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet
“…SEAL Team Six; can’t talk much about that, but it was an honor to lead those great Americans...” — The Mark Levin Show
“The only reason you know about SEAL Team Six is ‘cause politicians ran their mouth about it after we got Osama Bin Laden and Captain Phillips, didn’t they?” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“I continued to be a senior advisor for what we would call s—uh, let’s just call them security activities and special operations, i.e., the black world...” — The Mark Levin Show
“Think pager bombs, black ops, and things that happen that don’t get divulged, mercifully, unless politicians talk about it.” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
“It just manifests itself in some very interesting activities and operations. Of course, we can’t talk about that, ‘cause that’s TS/SCI, it’s SAP [Special Access Program] information.” — The Mark Levin Show
“And I could go into some detail about that, but- Yeah ... there’s a movie about it and so forth and so on. But I will not disclose anything classified, ‘cause I still have a- I appreciate that, yeah ... a clearance and I, I will abide by- Yes ... uh, the, uh, the agreements I have made with our US government as they pertain to such.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I’m very familiar with it. I’ll say no more.” — USA Cares Podcast
“...many times we would deploy in the dark in the night- Mm-hmm ... and we would come back in the dark at night- Yeah ... ‘cause our nation asked us to. Right. And I won’t go into any further details.” — USA Cares Podcast
“I won’t share the confidential private pieces that are classified or otherwise I shouldn’t divulge...” — Optimist Club Speaker Series
A few things here are worth flagging. Gallrein refers to "security activities" — that phrase does not exist in military or intelligence parlance; the correct terms are "special activities" or "sensitive activities." He also describes a classification level as "secret compartmented information" — it's sensitive compartmented information.
As if the whole Chris Kyle cosplay isn’t enough, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is en route to Kentucky to campaign with Gallrein, according to the local press.
There is one episode in Gallrein’s post-military career that exists in full public record — and it cuts against his vaunted expertise.
After retiring, he took a job as a Safety and Security Specialist at the Department of Energy’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the country’s most sensitive nuclear facilities. He was fired in May 2013. He filed a whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation for raising concerns about deficiencies in security training programs.
The complaint was dismissed. Among the reasons: he had reported his concerns to a fellow subcontractor employee — not a DOE official or his own employer’s chain of command, as the regulations required. The man campaigning on mastery of the classified world filed his whistleblower complaint with the wrong person and lost his job at a nuclear security facility. He has not mentioned any of this on the campaign trail.
This hiding behind national security is not a partisan phenomenon. Last year I wrote about the Democrat national security moms, electeds like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin. The political establishment loves these figures because national security is an official-sounding way to tell the public to shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle things.
Gallrein seems to think that “his country” or “the nation” is some disembodied entity that doesn’t have elected officials, that “national security” is what gives him orders, and that the secret world is an autonomous entity. Most important though, he believes that the people are sheep and that those in uniform have some license to protect them regardless of pesky politicians, and that that license derives from some secret regulation rather than from laws and the Constitution.
What Gallrein represents is something both parties have been quietly building toward for twenty-five years: the national security state as its own source of political legitimacy, floating above democratic accountability, not answerable to the public it claims to serve.
The sheep vote Tuesday.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
This guy is merely a puppet for Trump as he has nothing to say for himself and is running as an icon for Trump. This is exactly the person you don't want in office as he will be sure to do anything and everything requested of him by Trump. Massie thinks for himself, exactly what you want in an elected official.
Arrogant, insulting military cosplayer… like hegseth…. Tats and big mouths …. Using military secret missions like badges of honor… if I have to explain it to you then I will have to kill you. Bulls hit!