Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly ripped the recently fired Captain Brett Crozier in a recent speech for sending a letter warning of a coronavirus outbreak on board the ship he was commanding, The Daily Caller reports.

“If he [Crozier] didn’t think, in my opinion, that this information [the letter] wasn’t going to get out into the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naive or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this. The alternative is that he did this on purpose,” Modly said in a speech to the sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, who Crozier had commanded up until his dismissal last week. Many of those sailors had been seen in a video cheering Crozier as he left the ship.

“So think about that when you cheer the man off the ship who exposed you to that,” Modly said. “I understand you love the guy. It’s good that you love him. But you’re not required to love him.”

An anonymous Navy officer who has familiar with the situation told the Daily Caller that commanders tried to keep Modly’s speech from the media.

“And the CAG (carrier air wing commander, the guy in charge of the aircraft on the carrier, an O-6) sent an email to the entire crew after the SECNAV was done saying ‘in order to publish a speech you need that person’s explicit permission and you don’t have the secant’s permission to publish what he just said, so if you recorded what he just said delete it immediately,'” the officer said, according to the Daily Caller.

“That’s totally not how publishing speeches work, but it’s clear they quickly realized how poorly the speech was received and are trying to suppress it,” they added.