Tim Walz Misrepresented His Military Service

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s military service has come under well-deserved scrutiny following his selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. As a career politician, Walz has long touted his service in the National Guard, yet this service is only now getting close attention as questions arise about how and where he served.

There is no question that Walz bailed on his National Guard unit when it was called up for deployment to Iraq. But it also appears that he has been mischaracterizing his military service since at least 2005. The Harris campaign tacitly acknowledged as much by correcting the record this week. As first reported in Politico on Thursday, the Harris campaign quietly revised their campaign website to remove references of Walz being a “retired Command Sergeant Major” in lieu of the more technically accurate claim that “he once served at the Command Sergeant Major rank.”  

As I wrote in The Federalist earlier this week, Walz failed to follow through on his commitment to serve and had his promotion to command sergeant major retroactively revoked shortly after retiring, with his final retired rank being master sergeant. At the time of this writing, Walz had still not changed his official Minnesota biography or other social media posts to reflect the “tweaked” messaging.

A deeper analysis of Walz’s historical campaign messaging reveals that the recent tweaking may not be the first time he’s tried to carefully thread the needle on messaging about his military service, and suggests an intention to mislead voters that runs all the way back to his first campaign for Congress in 2005. 

A review of Walz’s records shows that he did initially retire as a command sergeant major on May 16, 2005, but it was quickly revised and updated on Sept. 10 of that year. Yet Walz continued to publish his superseded discharge certificate with the command sergeant major rank as part of a media packet until the week after his election victory in 2006.

To what extent did this intentional misinformation, spread by his own campaign, skew media coverage? And why did Walz tighten up his messaging after his election victory? These are questions the American public deserve prompt answers to. Here are eight more.

1) At what point did you learn of the Sept. 10, 2005, revision of your May 16 discharge paperwork showing you were demoted from command sergeant major to master sergeant?

2) Why did you continue to publish this inaccurate and superseded (that is, false) discharge paperwork on your campaign website and only remove it the week after your victory in November 2006?

3) At what point did you first become aware that apart from The Wall Street Journal’s David Rogers (in his March 30, 2006, and Oct. 30, 2006, articles) referring to you, correctly, as a “retired master sergeant,” other media coverage, which you promoted on your campaign website, erroneously referred to you as a “retired command sergeant major,” even though you were not one?

4) Did you or anyone affiliated with your campaign ever encourage media on background (or otherwise) to adopt your campaign’s revised messaging and change their characterization to “former command sergeant major?”

5) At what point did you first become aware of media reporting, including a book you favorably endorsed which stated you served in Afghanistan, that erroneously described your military service?

6) At what point in time (if ever) did you attempt to correct or clarify this false characterization of your service?

7) Even today, in various communications and most notably your official gubernatorial biography, you continue to adopt the honorific “Command Sergeant Major Walz retired” or formulations like “achieved the rank of” or “once served as” when referencing your service. But isn’t that false, with “retired Master Sergeant Walz” being the correct characterization?

8) In your March 20, 2005, campaign press release, you acknowledged the potential of your unit’s upcoming deployment to Iraq and stated “I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on.” Why, and at what point during the ensuing 58 days before your second retirement was effective did your views on this change?

It remains to be seen if the controversy around how Walz characterized his military service will spin out of control for the Harris-Walz campaign. But if Walz is proud of his service and has nothing to hide, he should have no problem holding a press conference to address all these questions without delay.

For nearly 20 years, Matt Beebe served as a countermeasures engineer in the Air Force and a contractor in the intelligence community before launching an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter @theMattBeebe.