Army Officer Relieved of Command, Facing Discharge over Racist Social Media Posts – By Steve Beynon and Konstantin Toropin (Military.com) / January 7, 2022
A lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve was relieved of command in 2020 and is now facing removal from the force after he peddled racist opinions to his troops and peppered his social media accounts with a consistent flow of outlandish posts attacking public officials that his own lawyer described as racist, inflammatory and in poor taste.
Lt. Col. Michael Spillane, a medical officer with the 7207th Medical Support Group based out of Webster, New York, wrote a memo to soldiers under his command in June 2020, warning them of the “medical crisis created by China” and that “peaceful assemblies have turned into riots, looting, and shooting.”
It was a memo full of typos and half truths laced with partisan wink and nod warnings about Democrats and minority-led protests amid a reckoning of racial justice, a highly atypical memo from an Army officer to his troops. Spillane’s commander, Col. Jeffery Wood, later described the memo as offensive and inflammatory, in documents reviewed by Military.com.
“There is no reason to use such broad generalizations that can be taken as offensive,” Wood wrote in a June 29, 2020, disciplinary statement for Spillane.
