Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz did not challenge former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she lauded him for his contributions “on the battlefield” in a recently surfaced video from 2007.
Concerns regarding Walz’s assertions about his military service and the specifics surrounding his 2005 retirement from the Minnesota National Guard have emerged following Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement of him as her running mate on Tuesday. In the video, Pelosi, along with other House Democrats, was addressing a congressional resolution related to the Iraq War while she introduced Walz, highlighting his military background.
“We’ll hear from Congressman — Command Sergeant Major — Tim Walz,” Pelosi said during the event in the CSPAN video while introducing Walz, then a first-term Minnesota Congressman. “And I was so moved by what Tim has said. He said he has taught these young people in high school, and then he had to lead them in the armed services. So he has, he knows, the potential of our young people and what we put at risk when we send them into harm’s way without the equipment that they need. He will speak for himself, but I want him to know how much we all appreciate his service to our country, whether it’s in the classroom or on the battlefield.”
FLASHBACK: Tim Walz thanked Nancy Pelosi at a press conference in 2007 in which she said while introducing him that "we appreciate his service on the battlefield."
CSPAN then identified Walz as an "Afghanistan veteran." pic.twitter.com/6HaKNyfKsf
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2024
Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee, criticized Walz for “dishonesty” during a campaign event in Wisconsin on Wednesday. He referenced comments made by Walz in a video shared on X by the Harris campaign, in which Walz advocated for a ban on what he termed “assault weapons,” describing them as “weapons of war, that I carried in war.”
Although Walz held the position of command sergeant major, he ultimately retired as a master sergeant due to not completing the necessary coursework for promotion, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon. Following backlash, the Harris campaign removed the designation of Walz as a “retired Command Sergeant Major” from his biography on their website. Additionally, retired Army Command Master Sergeants Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr alleged in a 2018 letter to the West Central Tribune that Walz retired to evade deployment to Iraq, a claim that gained renewed attention after his selection as Harris’s running mate.
“The bottom line in all of this is gut wrenching and sad to explain. When the nation called, he quit. He failed to complete the United States Army Sergeants Major Academy. He failed to serve for two years following completion of the academy, which he dropped out of. He failed to serve two years after the conditional promotion to Command Sergeant Major,” Behrends and Herr wrote. “He failed to fulfill the full six years of the enlistment he signed on September 18th, 2001. He failed his country. He failed his state. He failed the Minnesota Army National Guard, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, and his fellow Soldiers. And he failed to lead by example. Shameful.”
