Harris campaign says Walz ‘misspoke’ in a comment about his military service
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Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota speaking at a Kamala Harris for president rally on July 27 before she selected him as the vice-presidential nominee.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK - Officials for US Vice-President Kamala Harris’ campaign are trying to clean up remarks made in 2018 by her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, that gave the impression that he had served in combat, just days after the campaign had inadvertently drawn attention to them to illustrate his views about responsible gun ownership.
In a clip from a political event in 2018, when he represented Minnesota in the House, he referenced his 24 years in the Army National Guard and background as a hunter while discussing his views on gun control. He spoke of supporting common-sense gun legislation that also protects Second Amendment rights, including background checks and restrictions on high-powered firearms.
“We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at,” Mr Walz said in the clip, which the campaign had shared on Aug 6 on social media, just hours after Ms Harris named him as her running mate.
Mr Walz deployed after the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, but not in a combat zone.
Ms Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement on Aug 10 that Mr Walz’s remarks had been a misstatement and that he had not tried to mislead anyone about his military service.
“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the governor misspoke,” Ms Hitt said.
Mr Walz, who is in his second term as Minnesota’s governor, has come under intense scrutiny from Republicans over his military record. They have accused him of exaggerating his record and of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq, rekindling claims made by two retired command sergeant majors during Mr Walz’s first campaign for governor in 2018.
Leading that criticism is Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, former president Donald Trump’s running mate, who has accused Mr Walz of “stolen valour”.
Mr Vance served in the US Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 during the Iraq war. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 with the aircraft wing but was not a front-line combatant. His official military occupation, known as a combat correspondent, meant he was tasked with basic communication roles such as writing articles about the happenings in his unit.
The Republican broadsides against Mr Walz resembled the “Swift Boat” attacks in the 2004 presidential election that created a cloud of uncertainty over the military record of Senator John Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr Chris LaCivita, who is a senior strategist for the Trump campaign, was an architect of those attacks, which were highly effective.
The conservative-leaning editorial board of The Wall Street Journal spurned comparisons this past week between Mr Kerry’s situation and Mr Walz’s military service, which it wrote was “far different”. It said that there were plenty of reasons to criticise Mr Walz, but that his military record was not one of them. It quoted a New York Sun editorial that described the attacks as “thin gruel”.
On a number of occasions, Mr Walz has emphasised that he did not serve in combat. During a CNN interview in July, when anchor Jake Tapper said Mr Walz had deployed to Afghanistan, Mr Walz corrected him and that he had served in Europe in support of that war.
In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 2018, when he was running for governor, Mr Walz said of his military career: “I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did.”
And when he was running for re-election as governor in 2022, the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote that he had shied away from dramatic accounts of his time in the National Guard, framing himself instead as a former high school teacher and football coach.
The 2018 clip of Mr Walz saying that “those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at” was not the only one that Trump’s allies seized on this week.
They also pounced on a 2007 C-Span clip from a Capitol Hill news conference when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House Speaker at the time, thanked Mr Walz for his service “on the battlefield”. Mr Walz was identified by C-Span as an “Afghanistan war veteran” at the time. NYTIMES
