President Trump on Monday said at a press conference that he might get involved in a public relations controversy that emerged in the Navy after an aircraft carrier commander was removed for sounding the alarm about a coronavirus outbreak on his ship in a leaked letter.
Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly unwittingly added fuel to the controversy when he gave a surprise speech to sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt and called ousted Captain Brett Cozier “too naïve or too stupid” to be a commanding officer of a ship like this, according to Reuters.
Modly later issued an apology to the Navy and Crozier and said, “Let me be clear, I do not think Captain Brett Cozier is naive nor stupid. I think, and always believed him to be the opposite. We pick our carrier commanding officers with great care. Captain Crozier is smart and passionate.”
President Donald Trump told a press conference that he is good at “settling arguments.” Trump said Cozier should have resisted sending the letter but he did not want to destroy “somebody for having a bad day,” the report said.
WIBC’s Tony Katz disagrees:
“When Captain Cozier was relieved of his command, those on his ship may have been sad, but I would argue it was the right thing to do. The chain of command matters. And the chain of command matters during a pandemic because if it doesn’t matter during a pandemic, then what’s all that damn training for?
“Now I was never mad at Captain Cozier, but I do believe that there is such a thing as the chain of command, there is a difference between right and wrong, and there are ways that these things should be handled. You wanna get peoples’ attention? That’s fine. But you sent out a letter to 30 people, unsecured, and you knew it was going to leak. You knew it was going to leak and it did. The chain of command matters.”
Click below to hear Tony’s full commentary.
