The Navy tried to cast Capt. Brett Crozier as a villain. New emails reveal how much support he really had
'You are a great leader and Naval Officer.'
BY JEFF SCHOGOL | UPDATED MAR 8, 2021 11:22 AM
The Navy has repeatedly blamed Capt. Brett Crozier for the unprecedented novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt last year, but newly-released emails show several of Crozier’s colleagues instantly recognized that he had put the lives of his crew above his own career.
“You are a great leader and Naval Officer,” Rear Adm. Stephen Barnett, commander of Navy Region Northwest, told Crozier in April. The Navy’s top brass would say the opposite two months later when Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday accused Crozier of acting too slowly to contain the disease and putting his ship at risk by lifting a quarantine.
Barnett’s email was among more than 1,200 pages of communications the Navy provided to Task & Purpose in response to its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for all emails sent to and from Crozier’s email address between March 25, 2020 and April 2, 2020.
Crozier wrote an urgent letter to other Navy commanders on March 30 warning that his sailors would die unless most of the ship’s crew was moved into individual quarantine ashore. He was fired on April 2, shortly after the San Francisco Chronicle published a leaked copy of his letter.
According to officials, Crozier was initially fired because he had created “a little bit of a panic on the ship” by sending his letter, which argued that sailors did not need to die, since “we are not war.”
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/emails-reveal-brett-crozier-support/
