This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

A former Navy Seal controversially granted clemency for war crimes by Donald Trump last month was photographed with the president in Florida at the weekend, and handed over a gift to thank him for reversing his demotion.

Chief petty officer Eddie Gallagher, who was convicted of posing with the dead body of a teenage Islamic State terrorist he had just killed in Iraq in 2017, posted photographs to his Instagram account showing himself and his wife Andrea meeting the president and first lady, Melania Trump, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.

“Finally got to thank the President and his amazing wife by giving them a little gift from Eddie’s deployment to Mosul,” a caption accompanying the eight photographs said, without identifying what the present was.

Trump angered military leaders in November when he granted clemency to Gallagher as one of a number of interventions in cases of service members accused of killings in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Gallagher’s case, Trump ordered a promotion for the special warfare operator first class who had been cleared by a military jury in 2018 of murder but convicted of posing with the body. “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife,” Gallagher had boasted in an email to a friend that contained a photograph of him holding the deceased captive by the head.

Just weeks before Trump interceded, Adm Mike Gilday, the US navy’s chief of operations, denied Gallagher’s request for clemency and upheld a sentence of a reduction in rank.

“The Navy will NOT be taking away War Fighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident pin,” Trump tweeted on 21 November. “The case was handled very badly from the beginning.”

Gallagher was allowed to retire from the service as a Seal, retaining an additional $200,000 pension he would have forfeited had his demotion stood.

Navy secretary Richard Spencer was ousted by the White House in the aftermath of the controversy, and wrote a scathing opinion piece for the Washington Post attacking Trump for his “shocking and unprecedented” intervention in Gallagher’s case, and claiming the president “has very little understanding” of how the military works.

Gallagher’s appearance at Mar-a-Lago came as little surprise to some observers, among them the legal analyst Glenn Kirschner, who accused Trump in a tweet of ushering in “the death of decency”.

Earlier, Gallagher was pictured with the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, at a conservative student action summit hosted by the campus activist group Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, according to the New York Post.