by WorldTribune Staff, August 7, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was demoted and did not retire from the U.S. Army as a command sergeant major as he has long claimed on his biography, the Minnesota National Guard confirmed on Wednesday.
While Walz temporarily held the title of command sergeant major he “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer, told Just the News.
GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said he was astonished that the Harris campaign had not checked out Walz’s military record and accused him of lying to make a political point.
Vance, who spent six years in the U.S. Marines, including six months deployed to Iraq, said: “There was a clip the Kamala campaign posted about him where he’s making a gun control argument. He said, ‘Look, you should not be able to carry the weapons that I carried in war.’ And I’m, I’m thinking to myself, well, when did you go to war? What weapon did you carry in the war, Tim, because apparently you skipped out on your unit before they went to Iraq. I know he didn’t go to a combat zone, so why is he lying to make a political point?”
The Minnesota governor was accused by two retired senior officials in the Minnesota National Guard of retiring shortly before his battalion was set for a deployment to Iraq in 2005.
The two retired Command Sergeants Major in the guard wrote in an open letter that they felt it was their “duty and responsibility to bring forth the truth as we know it concerning his service record.” Thomas Behrends, one signer of the letter, was chosen to replace Walz. (WorldTribune.com ran the letter on Tuesday as part of its coverage of Walz being selected by Kamala Harris as her running mate.)
According to the letter, Walz was selected in 2004 to serve as the Command Sergeant Major of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and by September of that year Walz was conditionally promoted to the rank.
But, by early 2005, Walz’s battalion was ordered to mobilize for an active duty deployment to Iraq. Shortly after, in May 2005, Walz “quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war,” according to the two Command Sergeants Major.
“When your country calls, you are supposed to run into battle — not the other way,” Behrends told the New York Post Tuesday. He ran away. It’s sad.”
“He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States. That’s not who I would pick to run for vice president,” he added.
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The extent of the Harris team’s vetting of Walz looks even shakier after a Daily Mail report on Wednesday showed a resurfaced mugshot, a grainy black and white photo of a “glassy-eyed” Walz moments after he was arrested Sept. 30, 1995, and booked into Dawes County Jail, Nebraska, on charges of speeding and driving while intoxicated.
Walz at the time was a 31-year-old schoolteacher and football coach in Alliance, Nebraska, when he was chased down by a State Patrol officer and charged for driving at 96mph in a 55mph zone. He was also serving in the Army National Guard at the time.
According to a court transcript, Walz had a blood alcohol concentration of .128.
Court transcripts reviewed by DailyMail.com show that Walz’s attorney Russell Harford claimed his client’s speeding was due not to inebriation but to the fact that Walz had a hearing impairment which led him to believe that the officer attempting to stop him was chasing him. He was ultimately fined $200 and court costs.
The incident first resurfaced during Walz’s 2006 campaign for Congress at which time a spokesman claimed that Walz simply “couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him.”
Kerry Greeley, Walz’s campaign manager at the time, told a reporter for the Rochester Post that it was Walz’s deafness from which he suffered thanks to his time serving with an artillery unit in the National Guard, lead to a miscommunication between Walz and the officer who stopped him.
There is no mention of Walz having any hearing impairment in the officer’s report and it is referenced only obliquely in the court proceedings that followed, but according to The New York Times he underwent corrective surgery in 2005.
Then there is the saga of “Tampon Tim.”
This is not satire.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed legislation which ensured every boys’ bathroom in public schools has tampons.
Yes, Minnesota taxpayer dollars went to a woke law which mandated boys be provided with a product they have no legitimate use for.
Walz signed the bill that was pushed by Democrat state Rep. Sandra Feist, who insisted “not all students who menstruate are female.”
The law went into effect on Jan. 1. State Republican lawmakers pushed back on the legislation, but ultimately failed to amend the bill to apply only for girls’ bathrooms.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called out Walz for the law shortly after Harris announced he would join her on the Democrat presidential ticket:
“As a woman, I think there is no greater threat to our health than leaders who support gender-transition surgeries for young minors, who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools,” Leavitt said on Fox News. “Those are radical policies that Tim Walz supports. He actually signed a bill to do that.”
In 2023, Walz issued an executive order establishing Minnesota as a safe haven for children to receive trans surgeries.
The primary super PAC supporting GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump called Walz a “weird radical liberal,” as part of a new campaign ad against the governor.
“What could be weirder than signing a bill requiring schools to stock tampons in boys’ bathrooms?” the Make America Great Again Inc. account wrote Tuesday on X. “Or weirder than signing legislation allowing minors to receive sex change operations?”
Twice failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came to Walz’s defense: “How nice of the Trump camp to help publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and common-sense policy of providing free menstrual products to students in Minnesota public schools! Let’s do this everywhere,” Clinton posted on Facebook, sharing a #TamponTim meme featuring Walz’s face on a tampon box.
Breitbart’s Bradley Jaye noted: “Yet, Clinton’s use of the benign ‘students’ appears to intentionally distract from the issue under scrutiny — Walz’s woke and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars to provide tampons to young boys, who, of course, do not menstruate and have no productive use for tampons.”
“Not all students who menstruate are female” –
MN State Rep Sandra Feist.Sandra sponsored the bill which Tim Walz signed which requires tampons in boy’s bathrooms in schools.#TamponTim pic.twitter.com/Bou8GErwBG
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 6, 2024
Vetting Walz, Day 2: Vance doesn’t hold back; ‘Tampon Tim’ added by Editor Two on August 7, 2024
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