Making Sense of Some Tim Walz Service Claims

A follow up to a conversation on the Megyn Kelly Show.

By now, you’re surely familiar with the story. Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential selection, has made a habit of exaggerating his military service. I wanted to catalogue some of the embellishments — and outright falsehoods — and highlight a few examples of the media’s role in pushing them, or obfuscating the truth.

The Facts: It’s hard to keep track of all the misleading or outright false statements Walz has made, so I tried to compile at least what we know so far here.

As the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross (a phenomenal investigative journalist really in a class of his own) reported, Walz claimed he was a “veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom,” the name of the military operation in Afghanistan. He was seen holding an “Operation Enduring Freedom Veterans 4 Kerry” sign in 2004. He even used the claim, the Beacon reported, to launch his 2006 campaign for Congress.

The problem? Walz never served in Afghanistan. He never took part in Operation Enduring Freedom. He never saw combat, period.

But he’s pretended before. Also scooped by Ross at the Beacon, when former speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked Walz for his “service on the battlefield,” he said nothing. C-SPAN even dubbed Walz an “Afghanistan War Veteran.” Walz didn’t lift a finger to dispute the false assignment of valor.

In a 2010 debate clip recently unearthed, he appeared to go even further, calling the surge in Afghanistan “not a hypothetical” question for him as he’s “done that.” What is ‘that’ supposed to mean, if not the taking part in the surge in Afghanistan? It strains credulity.

 But perhaps the most egregious — a claim even pointed out as false by mainstream outlet’s fact-checkers (more on what these folks haven’t disputed below) — comes from a video recently resurfaced and promoted by Sen. JD Vance. In the 2018 clip. Walz, advocating for a ban on firearms dubbed “assault rifles,” claimed that he understood how dangerous these weapons were because he had carried them “in war.”

Again, this claim isn’t true. Walz and the campaign have walked it back since, saying he “misspoke.” How, exactly, one could misspeak in such a specifically-claiming-you-served-in-a-war and do so innocently is anyone’s guess.

The truth is that Walz cut out when his unit was scheduled to deploy. as Alpha News reported back in 2018. Shortly after hearing that his unit was deploying to Iraq, Walz announced his retirement, “leaving his battalion and its soldiers without a key leader as they prepared to go to war.”

Recent reporting from Caitlin Doornbos and Josh Christenson of the New York Post — who, unlike mainstream outlets, actually bothered to do real journalism and talk to Walz’s former soldiers about this story — revealed what the soldiers in his unit thought about him abandoning his men to run for Congress instead. The Post’s headline, as usual, sums it up well:

Which leads to another fabrication: his military rank.

Walz has repeatedly billed himself as a “retired command sergeant major,” including in his official government bio as governor.

But as Ashe Schow of the Daily Wire points out, that isn’t accurate:

Walz briefly held the position of command sergeant major as a conditional promotion, provided he adhered to several stipulations, including one that he serve a specific amount of time after that promotion, which Walz failed to do. Thus, his rank reverted back to what he was before that conditional promotion: Master sergeant, which is still rank E8 out E10 and a major accomplishment.

And, lastly, the campaign claimed that Walz was the Chairman of the House Veterans Committee — a post he never held. A small error, sure, but given the pattern, worth calling out.

Surely, considering the overwhelming evidence of deception by Walz, the mainstream media had their knives out, too? Ready to gut a politician who — of all things to lie about! — embellished his military service, and used it to advance his political ambitions?

Well…no.

The Spin: The media hasn’t seemed interested in applying any scrutiny to the man who might be a heartbeat away from the nuclear codes in a few months. Instead, they’ve pushed the falsehoods, or at least worked to play them down.

Outlets rushed to repeat Walz’s role as supposed committee chairman helping veterans — why bother to fact check the Democrats, right? — as soon as the campaign made the announcement. As RealClearPolitics’s White House reporter Philip Melanchthon Wegmann noted on Twitter, that included the Associated Press and New York Times. Perhaps the two most stalwart U.S. outlets, whom countless others repeat as trusted sources, parroting a false claim that anyone with internet access could debunk.

At least one outlet, USA Today, still has the claim about his supposed chairmanship online today. You would think that, even if an outlet wouldn’t bother to fact-check the easily disproven claim, they would at least remove it when it was pointed out. 

And the outlet also compares the claims to the “Swift Boat” attacks that brought down the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign, as a way to suggest the allegations against Walz were untrue or at least substantiated. 

USA Today wasn’t the only one who framed the call-outs of Walz’s deceptions this way. Here are headlines throwing around the same accusation from MSNBC, CNN, Politico, Washington Post, NPR, and New York Magazine.

But the central claim of these allegations — that Vance and Republicans are relying on bogus claim — simply isn’t true. Just re-read the evidence. Whether or not one finds it 100% damning or not, the idea that they are invented beggars belief.

That wasn’t all. There were plenty of other bogus claims. 

I don’t think this New York Times story could be worse than its headline (“Walz in the National Guard: A Steady Rise Ending With a Hard Decision”). But the rambling hagiography doesn’t even bother to dispute the points in contention. It just hypes up Walz, like a campaign poster masquerading as a news story. And look at that photo!

I’ve said it before, but the choice of images to accompany stories is very much an editorial decision.

CNN said highlighting the information that discredited Walz’s claims was a “troll.” Again, “analysis” offered by news outlets is reliably ridiculous. 

The outlet also fact checked not the candidate who was fudging the truth, but the one who dared mention it. 

Washington Post did this go-after-the-critics fact-checking, too, alleging the claims above from the Free Beacon were “on the line” of a falsehood despite being there in black and white. 

The Associated Press did much the same, not bothering to really dispute the claims at all, just hand-waive them away. 

A good highlight on the value of “fact-check”ing from CBS News. Let me know if you can make out what’s being “confirmed” here, or what exactly they “investigated.”

As far as Politico appears to be concerned, it’s all in the past now. Updating Walz’s information to remove the fabrications is, apparently, just an “update,” where the campaign “tweaks” his bio. 

Really. 

MSNBC is just hopeless.

NBC News wasn’t much better. The only way whoever wrote this headline can understand this discourse is through the narrow lens of partisan bias. What’s at issue is the truth, at the risk of being too hifalutin, not merely the outcome of a political squabble.

For Vox, I’ll pass the mic to Peter Hasson, of the Washington Free Beacon, who defenestrated the outlet:

The Takeaway: This brouhaha represents what could charitably be called a noted incuriosity among the corporate press concerning an important part of the backstory for a major party nominee for vice president. It should go without saying, but Walz dedicating 24 years of his life to serve our country is commendable — at least as a matter of fact, at face value.

But it doesn’t put him beyond scrutiny, and his claims, taken together, clearly represent a characterization out of step with the facts. That fabrication job is much closer to “stolen valor” than commendable.

Playing fast-and-loose with the facts, though, is what politicians do. They exaggerate stories and experiences to score political points all the time. That doesn’t make it acceptable. But it is why accountability and scrutiny are so important for candidates for high office. That is, in theory, a key role of the media in any election, in any country — at least what we would consider a free press in a country with a fair election.

That we’re instead getting obfuscation from the press on these important points, as they collectively report nonsense puff pieces too heavy-handed for Pravda, is deeply, deeply troubling.

Last week, I joined the Megyn Kelly Show, in a segment with Stephen Miller, to discuss this and other dubious statements by and about Walz, particularly the media’s role in it all. The whole episode was dedicated to Walz and his public persona thus far. It’s well worth your time, if you’re interest in the actual facts of the case:

My money is that this kind of media malfeasance is only going to get worse the closer we get to Election Day. Check back here for more. I’m sure I’ll need to invest a lot of time on this and related subjects.