Donald Trump’s “acting” Navy Secretary Thomas Modly has now resigned, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, amid growing calls for his removal by lawmakers and retired military officials.
Calls for Modly’s resignation mounted in the wake of Modly’s firing of USS Theodore Roosevelt Capt. Brett Crozier, and a subsequent address to the ship’s crew in which Modly demeaned and insulted Crozier while justifying his own decision. Modly issued an apology for those remarks afterwards.
Capt. Crozier was removed by Modly for authoring a four-page letter urgently requesting quarantine quarters for his coronavirus-infected crew, a letter that was obtained by the press but which ran contrary to Trump administration efforts to downplay the impact and severity of the emerging pandemic. Modly had stated in remarks to an interviewer that he had removed Crozier to avoid Trump’s own intervention; Modly’s predecessor, Richard Spencer, was removed amid the scandal of Trump reaching down through the chain of command to pardon Navy war criminal Edward Gallagher.