For another, unlike Gallagher and Golsteyn, he had acted, his lawyers claimed, because his platoon faced an imminent threat of attack. For one thing, Lorance hadn’t committed the murders himself he had ordered others to shoot. His case seemed different from those of Major Matthew Golsteyn and Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, the two other service members accused of war crimes in whose cases the president had also intervened on November 15, 2019. They reported him hours after the shooting. He had apparently wanted to impress his combat-hardened troops. Lorance, according to news accounts, was an inexperienced lieutenant who’d just taken over the platoon of an admired commander wounded in an IED attack. He had served six years of a 20-year sentence after being convicted of ordering the murders of two Afghan civilians near a small forward operating base outside Kandahar, one of the most violent and kinetic regions of the country. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
I wrote to former Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance in early March, four months after he was pardoned by President Donald Trump and released from the U.S.
