Chief Gallagher’s lawyer said the SEAL was writing a book about his career, but declined to provide details about whether he had signed a publishing deal or with whom.

To be sure, Chief Gallagher is hardly the first Navy SEAL to market his past. So many SEALs have published war stories and booked public speaking gigs in recent years that the satirical news site The Onion published an article announcing “Navy Forms Elite New SEAL Team to Write Best-Selling Tell-All Books.”

But Chief Gallagher is the first to do it in the wake of a war crime court-martial, and the only one who has sought to tie his public persona so closely to a political party and a divisive commander in chief.

Chief Gallagher, 40, sometimes went by the nickname Blade during his 20 years in the Navy. He served eight combat deployments and was awarded repeated medals for valor under fire.

But he also ran into trouble over the years. He was investigated for shooting a small girl while targeting a suspected Taliban member in Afghanistan in 2010, and was arrested and accused of assaulting a Navy police officer in 2014. In both cases, no criminal charges were filed.

Despite his past, Chief Gallagher was respected in the SEAL teams as an aggressive operator. But when he was assigned to lead his first platoon in combat in 2017 in Mosul, Iraq, SEALs who served under him said he became fixated on getting in firefights, made bizarre and dangerous tactical decisions, seemed to not know how to do his job and killed people with little regard to the rules of engagement.

In video interviews with investigators, multiple SEALs broke down in tears, describing their leader as “evil” and “toxic.”