Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s military service has rightly come under fire following his selection as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate. A career politician, Walz has long boasted about his service in the National Guard, but that service is only now coming under scrutiny as questions arise about how and where he served.
There is no doubt that Walz left his National Guard unit when it was called up for deployment to Iraq. But it also appears that he has been misrepresenting his military service since at least 2005. The Harris campaign quietly admitted as much by correcting the information this week. As Politico first reported on Thursday, the Harris campaign quietly revised its campaign website, removing references to Walz being a “retired command sergeant major,” and instead making the more technically accurate claim that he “once served with the rank of command sergeant major.”
As I wrote in the Federalist earlier this week, Walz failed to meet his obligation to serve and his promotion to command sergeant major was retroactively revoked shortly after his retirement. His final rank after retirement was master sergeant. At the time of this writing, Walz had not yet changed his official Minnesota biography or other social media posts to reflect the “tweaked” messages.
A closer analysis of Walz’s campaign messages to date shows that the recent adjustments may not be the first time he has tried to walk a fine line in his messaging about his military service. The intent to deceive voters points to a period that stretches back to his first run for Congress in 2005.
A look at Walz’s records shows that he initially retired as a command sergeant major on May 16, 2005, but his record was quickly revised and updated on September 10 of that year. Yet Walz continued to release his superseded discharge certificate with the rank of command sergeant major as part of a media package until the week after his election victory in 2006.
To what extent did this deliberate misinformation, spread by his own campaign team, distort media coverage? And why did Walz toughen up his message after winning the election? These are questions the American public deserves answers to immediately. Here are eight more.
1) When did you learn of the revision to your discharge papers dated May 16, 2005, indicating that you had been demoted from Command Sergeant Major to Master Sergeant?
2) Why did you continue to post these inaccurate and outdated (i.e., false) firing documents on your campaign website and only remove them the week after your victory in November 2006?
3) When did you first become aware that in the March 30, 2006 and October 30, 2006 articles by David Rogers of the Wall Street Journal, you were correctly referred to as a “retired master sergeant,” but in other media reports supporting you on your campaign website, you were incorrectly referred to as a “retired command sergeant major,” even though you were not one?
4) Have you or anyone associated with your campaign ever encouraged the media, behind the scenes (or otherwise), to adopt your campaign’s revised message and change their characterization to “former Command Sergeant Major”?
5) When did you first learn that your military service was being falsely portrayed in the media, including in a book you recommended that covered your deployment in Afghanistan?
6) At what point (if ever) did you attempt to correct or clarify this mischaracterization of your service?
7) Even today, in various communications and particularly in your official gubernatorial biography, you still use the honorific title “Retired Command Sergeant Major Walz” or phrases such as “attained the rank of” or “once served as” when referring to your service. But isn’t that incorrect, since “Retired Master Sergeant Walz” is the correct title?
8) In your press release of March 20, 2005, you acknowledged the possibility of an impending deployment of your unit to Iraq and stated, “I have a responsibility not only to prepare my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if required.” Why and at what point during the subsequent 58 days before the effective date of your second retirement did your views on this matter change?
It remains to be seen whether the controversy surrounding Walz’s characterization of his military service to the Harris-Walz campaign will spiral out of control. But if Walz is proud of his service and has nothing to hide, he should have no problem holding a press conference immediately to answer all of these questions.
Matt Beebe spent nearly 20 years as a defense engineer in the Air Force and as a contract worker in the intelligence community before founding an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter at @theMattBeebe.
