The problem with Walz’s military service is that he appears to have lied about it for years— and gotten away with it.
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.
