In his successful runs for state senator in Montana and then for Congress, Rep. Ryan Zinke has promoted his 23-year career in the Navy SEALs as one of his main credentials, going so far as to put the SEALs' Trident symbol on his campaign bus.
While he has portrayed his accomplishments in the Navy in glowing terms, Zinke, a Republican and President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of the interior, has acknowledged one "glitch": that he improperly billed the government for travel to his home in Montana when he was a midlevel SEAL Team 6 officer in the late 1990s. He had to repay $211 for one of two trips, he has said, maintaining that the episode did not derail what he described as a "brilliant" career.
But two retired admirals under whom Zinke served say his account understates the damage that it did. Zinke was in fact punished for abusing his travel expenses, they say, through an evaluation that prevented him from rising to senior levels in the Navy.
His former commanding officer in SEAL Team 6, retired Vice Adm. Albert Calland III, who had never before discussed the matter publicly, said in an interview that it was "an easy decision" to hit Zinke hard over the travel claims, which came at a time when he was supposed to help prevent such abuses.
"I gave him a fitness report that I thought would not allow him to get to captain, and that seemed, in that regard, to work OK," Calland said. Even though Zinke served in a succession of No. 2 jobs in special operations after that, "he never got command," the admiral said.
Another retired vice admiral, Sean Pybus, who was Zinke's boss after he left SEAL Team 6, said Calland's decision to cite Zinke for "lapses in judgment" in failing to set a proper example was a red flag for boards screening officers for coveted command jobs.
Even if a fitness report -- essentially a performance evaluation -- gives top marks in other areas, as Zinke's did, "language there like 'Hey, this officer has questionable judgment,' that would keep him from being selected for a command position," Pybus said. "And I think that's exactly what happened."
Zinke has said he took the trips to scout training locations in Montana and nearby parts of Washington and took leave while he was there to do construction work on a family home in Whitefish, Mont. But officials who were at the command said he had less reason to scout sites at the time because he was finishing a two-year tour as an assault team leader. They said one of the trips also seemed suspicious because he sought reimbursement for excess airline baggage even though he was traveling alone.
Calland recalled that there was "a lot of discussion" among senior officers about how to punish him. It also hurt Zinke, the officials said, that the trips came when SEAL Team 6 -- which, though now best known for killing Osama bin Laden, had initially been filled with hard-drinking mavericks who flouted the rules -- wanted to project a more professional image to compete with the Army's Delta Force for top missions.
A spokesman for Trump said that Zinke, 55, was preparing for a Senate confirmation hearing today and that neither he nor the transition team would comment for this article. Zinke's supporters say he has long since transcended the old problems through his political work and by becoming the first SEAL team member to be nominated for a Cabinet position.
While the main focus of the hearing is likely to be his support for increasing energy drilling and mining on public lands, and his stated view that climate change is "not proven science," senators could also question him about his Navy career.
Even after Calland gave him declining performance marks in military bearing and leadership over the travel matters in mid-1999, Zinke was promoted to the rank of commander.
But while he would have been eligible two or three times before he retired to be placed in charge of a unit as a commanding officer, he never was. And without serving as a commanding officer, he could not become a captain, as some of his SEAL peers have.
Kenneth Stethem, a retired SEAL chief petty officer who supports Zinke, said the travel trouble seemed minor so many years later. "We have a saying in the teams: 'You never shoot a high-caliber man with a low-caliber bullet,' and that's exactly what's going on right here," he said.
But some former SEAL team members claim that Zinke has also exploited his past -- he placed the SEALs' insignia on his campaign bus in violation of Defense Department guidelines against politicizing such symbols -- and that he exaggerated what he did in his later military jobs to obscure that he never received commands of his own.
Information for this article was contributed by Doris Burke of The New York Times.
A Section on 01/17/2017