CV NEWS FEED // Four veterans who served in the Minnesota Army National Guard along with now-Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz joined popular podcast hostess Megyn Kelly this week to discuss swirling accusations that Walz has misrepresented his military record for personal gain.
Retired Command Sergeant Major (CSM) Paul Herr told Kelly that Walz is “a liar, because he told me and other sergeant majors … that ‘You can count on me. I will deploy with my unit.’ His words to my ears and others’.”
“That’s how I know,” Herr added. “I’m not making it up.”
Fellow guardsmen and other critics have long charged Walz with retiring from the National Guard specifically to avoid deployment to Iraq.
Herr said his “blood” is “boiling” because “Walz has done nothing but lie to feather his own bed his entire career.”
Later in the interview, Kelly stated that Walz has referred to himself as a CSM “over and over and over” – while Walz’s former battalion commander maintains that the vice presidential candidate “did not earn” the rank.
>> WALZ’S FORMER BATTALION COMMANDER: HE ‘GLOMS ONTO’ CSM RANK HE ‘DID NOT EARN’ <<
“We have pushed back against that,” responded Herr, referring to Walz’s claim of the rank. “We tried doing it … relatively quietly and we were ignored.”
“If he would’ve never mentioned the Sergeant Major thing, we may not be really sitting here,” the retired CSM added. He specified that he had to put in two years of classes to keep his CSM rank.
Retired CSM Tom Behrends compared Walz’s insistence that he is a retired CSM to a medical school dropout claiming to be a doctor.
“If a civilian saw that … he’d get thrown in jail,” Behrends said. “This guy is a military impersonator with that.”
Kelly subsequently played a montage of Walz referring to himself, or other people referring to him, as a retired CSM.
“He misspoke a lot,” quipped Tom Schilling, a former member of Walz’s battalion.
Last month, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson said Walz “misspoke” when he falsely claimed to have carried weapons “in war” during a 2018 speech in support of gun control.
>> HARRIS CAMPAIGN: WALZ ‘MISSPOKE’ WHEN HE FALSELY CLAIMED TO HAVE SERVED ‘IN WAR’ <<
During the interview, Kelly also brought up the fact that Walz has consistently appeared to not correct people who have falsely stated that he served in Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom.
“He allows things to get said that are lies,” Behrends noted. “Can the guy just have some loyalty and some integrity and do the right thing when nobody’s looking?”
Behrends said that, conversely, Walz “does the wrong thing when everybody’s watching, trying to get away with it and putting a spin on it so he can get another vote and hopefully get in the next level of office.”
“The whole point of us coming forward … It’s everything together,” Herr added:
It’s not just that he misspoke about being a Command Sergeant Major. It’s not just that he lied directly to my face and to other sergeant majors’ and officers’ faces about his commitment to going to war with his unit.
>> ‘HE QUIT’: NATIONAL GUARD OFFICERS SAY WALZ FAKED PARTS OF HIS MILITARY RECORD <<
Kelly said that Walz claimed he was a retired CSM on the Harris-Walz campaign website. “She had to pull that. He’s still saying it – the Minnesota governor’s office is still saying it.”
“It’s been brought to his attention for every year that he’s been doing it and he continues to do it. It must mean something to him,” she added.
Herr said that when someone exaggerates his military role, he is “robbing that suffering and that commitment and trifling it down for all the men and women that we have sent into harm’s way and that have not come back.”
“Everybody that did that commitment, you belittle it,” he added. “You’re taking a piece of their thunder and you’re trying to capture it and put it in a bottle for yourself and use that for your own benefit.”
Kelly introduced the interview episode, which runs over an hour long, by stating: “Many men who served with Gov. Walz when he was in the National Guard, and who served under him, have come forward to accuse him of that sin – stealing valor from the men he served with.”
Kelly summarized that Walz is accused of both “inflating his military rank” and “abandoning his men when they were deployed to Iraq.”
“Tim Walz has been battling this for a long, long time,” Kelly pointed out. “He’s been accused by many men of leaving the unit and inflating his rank falsely for the better part of twenty years now.”
“It’s been brought to his attention, it’s been brought to the attention of his campaign office … when he was announced” as Kamala Harris’ VP pick, Kelly added. “He never does anything about it.”
