More Stolen Valor Garbage: Walz Began His Political Career With Blatant Lie About Having Fought in the War on Terrorism; Atlantic Reporter Won't Say If Walz Lied to Him About Being a Combat Veteran, or If He Just Made It Up to Help Out the Team

Walz has been lying about being a combat veteran longer than he's been a shitheel leftwing politician.

Chuck Ross:

Tim Walz Falsely Claimed He Served in Afghanistan. When a Local Vet Called Him Out, His Office Did Nothing.

Walz launched his first congressional campaign as 'a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom'

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has described himself as "a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom," the official name of the U.S. government's war in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks.

But Walz never deployed to the Middle East. And, when an Iraq war veteran confronted Walz's aides with evidence of what he called "stolen valor," his aides didn't do much to address his concerns.

As a first-time congressional candidate in 2006, Walz's campaign announcement described him as "a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom," an archived version of the press release shows. Two years earlier, in 2004, Walz organized a protest against then-President George W. Bush in Mankato, Minn. A photo of the rally shows Walz carrying a sign reading "Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry."

Such a title historically applies to someone who served on the ground in Afghanistan during the Global War on Terrorism. Walz, a 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard, spent time in Norway in support of NATO forces and in Italy working in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. He had never seen combat, he told Minnesota Public Radio in 2018.

Walz's claims spurred Iraq war veteran David Thul, a sergeant in the Minnesota National Guard, to approach Walz's aides at the Democrat's Mankato office in 2009. Thul filmed the encounter, in which a staffer told Thul she was "not aware" of Walz serving in Afghanistan. Thul went on to present the 2004 photo of Walz, as well as Walz's website, to another aide, who acknowledged that constituents could get the false impression that Walz served in Afghanistan.

"Operation Enduring Freedom is limited to Afghanistan and the airspace directly above," Thul told the aide. "Congressman Walz is clearly claiming ... to be an Enduring Freedom veteran. Nobody disputes the fact that he is not an Afghanistan or Enduring Freedom veteran. So this represents a fairly serious issue." Asked whether he understood how constituents could falsely "assume that means [Walz] served in Afghanistan," the aide responded, "Perhaps, I guess."

The aide did not dispute that Walz was pictured in the 2004 photograph, and, indeed, a 2006 Atlantic article describes the spectacle of the future governor protesting the Bush visit with a group of high school students. The aide told Thul he would follow up with him. A source familiar with the situation said neither Walz nor his staffers followed through with that pledge.

Walz, who has called himself a "citizen soldier," has been accused before of embellishing his military service. Two Minnesota National Guardsmen said in 2022 that Walz falsely claimed he reached the rank of command sergeant major. But Walz did not fulfill the duties required to maintain that rank before he quit the service in 2005.

And Walz, in a video posted this week by the Harris campaign, called for a ban on the kind of guns "that I carried in war," the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Jordan Schachtel: Walz didn't just mislead people about being a combat veteran in Iraq, he straight-up lied about it.

Stolen Valor: Tim Walz launched political career on false claim as combat veteran in the War on Terror VP candidate told public and media that he ran for office after fighting in Iraq.

The Tim Walz Stolen Valor story goes back to the very beginning of his political career. From the onset of his foray into national politics, Walz sold himself to the public and the media as a combat veteran of the Global War on Terror, masking the reality that he quit the military to run for office and avoid being deployed to Iraq.

...

Just months after leaving his battalion to go to Iraq without him, he announced a run for Congress, and the dissembling about his serivce record began immediately.

Instead of being honest about his early departure from the military, Walz told the media a much more heroic tale, one that was entirely ficticious.

Bloomberg's Joshua Green, then employed at The Atlantic, was the first major reporter to profile Walz. In a piece discussing the then-congressional candidate, Green writes that in 2004, Walz left his hometown in Minnesota "to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom."

It's unclear if this is Green, a veteran reporter, omitting major facts, or if Walz is selling Green on a particular narrative. Nonetheless, the assertion is incredibly misleading, as it leaves the reader under the impression that Walz served as boots on the ground in the Global War on Terror, when in reality, he merely deployed to Italy in 2003 for a six month stint.

It gets much worse.

Yes, that first claim is misleading though not factually false: He did serve "overseas" -- in Italy -- in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

But here's where Walz completely removes the fig-leaf from the lie:

Green discusses a 2004 visit from former President George W. Bush to Gov. Walz's hometown, in which a protesting Walz (who was still serving in the military) supposedly demanded to speak to the then commander in chief.

"Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who'd just returned from fighting the war on terrorism," Green writes.

While the first instance can be written off as an issue of unclear reportage, the second example cannot be explained away. Walz was not just serving in a support role for the war effort (from Italy), he had been "fighting the war on terrorism."

According to the article, Walz was picked out of relative obscurity by Democrat operatives due to his military service. These operatives went out and recruited "veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," Green writes.

To this day, Green remains under the false impression that Walz served and fought in the war. In a piece for Bloomberg on Tuesday, he wrote that Walz served "in Iraq as part of Operation Enduring Freedom."

In marketing Walz as a veteran upstart politician, he created a false construct that involved heroism in the war in terror, when in reality, Tim Walz never fought in a war or anywhere near a war.

Green has not yet reported whether he made this claim up himself to boost Democrat candidates or if Walz lied to him.

You know that these motherfuckers are liars because they never, and I mean never, take Democrats to task for lying to them.

Because they're on board with the lies themselves. Green doesn't view Walz as having deceived him; he views Walz as pushing an effective, useful lie on the public. And he's not embarrassed to have been hoodwinked or mis-used; he's proud to have done his part to advance propaganda helpful to The Great Patriotic Soviet Cause.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:07 PM

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