Major Brezler was trying to save lives.
The attorney representing a Marine officer accused of mishandling classified information by warning troops in Afghanistan about the threat of an insider attack said he plans to argue that his client deserves the same leniency that Hillary Clinton received.
“And certainly, if Secretary Clinton becomes the next commander-in-chief, it would the ultimate hypocrisy for her to declare others unfit for service based on alleged misconduct equal to or less serious than that she herself engaged,” said Michael Bowe.
Bowe represents Maj. Jason Brezler, who used his personal email account in 2012 to send a classified briefing document to the operations officer at a U.S. base in Afghanistan about Sarwar Jan, an Afghan police chief who had recently arrived at the installation. Brezler had kicked Sarwar off a different U.S. installation two years earlier for unethical behavior.
Seventeen days after Brezler sent the email, a boy working as one of Sarwar’s personal servants killed three Marines on the base: Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson, 29, Cpl. Richard Rivera, 20, and Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley, 21.
Brezler has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. district court challenging a board of inquiry’s December 2013 recommendation that he be discharged for sending the email from his personal account and taking classified documents back home from Afghanistan so he could write a book. The Marine Corps has agreed not to discharge Brezler until October while his lawsuit moves forward. The federal judge in the case has vowed to hear arguments by then.