Montana Republican Senate nominee Tim Sheehy appears to have been caught in yet another lie about his military service.
NBC News reported on Thursday that despite Sheehy claiming to have been discharged from his service in the military because he was declared medically unfit to serve, his discharge records say Sheehy voluntarily resigned and did not cite any medical conditions.
From NBC News:
Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL running for the Senate in Montana, has said he was discharged from the military for medical reasons because of injuries he sustained on duty, but his discharge paperwork tells a different story.
The heavily redacted, two-page document obtained by NBC News indicates that Sheehy voluntarily resigned his commission and does not list any medical condition that forced him out of uniform, according to a review of the document and a current and former U.S. official familiar with the details of his separation.
This is the latest false claim Sheehy appears to have made about his time as a Navy SEAL, service he has touted on the campaign trail in his quest to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
In April, The Washington Post reported a discrepancy in a story Sheehy told about being shot in the arm. On the campaign trail, Sheehy said he was shot in the arm while serving in Afghanistan in 2012.
However, in October 2015, Sheehy went to the emergency room after a trip to Glacier National Park, where he reported having a gunshot wound in his arm. He told a park ranger that he had shot himself in the arm in the park by accident, and was fined $525 for illegally discharging a weapon in a national park.
He later said he purposefully lied to the ranger about the gunshot wound because he hadn’t reported being shot in the arm to the military. He said he didn’t report it to the military at the time because the wound may have been from friendly fire and he didn’t want anyone in his unit to get in trouble.
Yet a former Navy SEAL Sheehy worked with told The New York Times that Sheehy had never told him about being shot in Afghanistan, even though it almost certainly would have come up in conversations about their deployments. And Kim Peach, the park ranger who Sheehy told what happened that day in a Montana emergency room, told the Times, “I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day.”
Sheehy has never released the medical records from that day that would have said whether the bullet wound was fresh.
Military veterans in Montana held an event on Oct. 22 in which they slammed Sheehy as an "egregious” and “serial liar" who can't be trusted because of the discrepancy in his story about the gunshot wound.
“In some circles, we veterans call this stolen valor,” Michael Jarnevic, who was in the military for more than 40 years and at the event on Tuesday said, according to a report in the Daily Montanan. “And it’s one of the most horrific things you can do as a veteran.”
Questions about his military service are not the only scandal Sheehy has faced during the election. Sheehy was hit by a lawsuit in April from former employees of his aerial firefighting company of defrauding them out of millions of dollars.
Sheehy has also been slammed by Native American groups in the state after he used racist stereotypes in talking about the Native population in the state. At a fundraiser in November 2023, Sheehy talked about going cattle branding on Montana’s Crow Reservation, and said it’s “a great way to bond with all the Indians out there while they’re drunk at 8 AM.”
Polls show Sheehy, a multimillionaire Minnesota transplant, leading Tester in the race, which could determine control of the Senate. Tester has an uphill battle to overcome the likely double-digit win former President Donald Trump will pull off in the state, which would require Tester to win over a number of GOP voters.
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