Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz’s campaign presented misleading accounts of his military service in his first race for Congress, according to Joe Simonson, a former undergraduate fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI). Mr. Simonson works for The Washington Free Beacon. His latest investigative story reported that Walz shamefully inflated his military record in the press packets for his successful 2006 campaign for a Minnesota congressional seat.
A Wall Street Journal article said Walz “served overseas during the early war in Afghanistan.” An Atlantic piece said that he had “just returned from fighting the war on terrorism” and was one of the “veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” running for Congress. Mr. Simonson said that all these quoted remarks are untrue.
This information, he writes, “adds to a growing pattern of incidents in which Walz, the governor of Minnesota, either misrepresented his military service or promoted others’ misrepresentations of it.” At least twice, including in his 2006 campaign announcement as reported earlier by The Free Beacon, he has “described himself as a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, the official name of the. . .war in Afghanistan.”
“Other press releases from the time, obtained by The Free Beacon. . .implied Walz served in Iraq as well.” Mr. Simonson notes that he “did not serve in either Afghanistan or Iraq” but was stationed in Italy from late 2003 to early 2004.
By his own acknowledgement in a 2018 interview, Walz never saw combat. Yet a video posted recently by the Kamala Harris campaign has Walz saying in favor of new gun control legislation: “we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is [sic] the only place those weapons are at.”
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