Even though Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris has recanted her running mate’s false claim about his military rank on the Harris-Walz campaign website, Gov. Tim Walz still hasn’t retracted the lie on the official government website of the Minnesota governor.
Last week, after Harris announced her running mate, Walz was exposed for making a number false claims about his military record – among them, that he was a retired command sergeant major. While he was once elevated to that level, he had been bumped back down to master sergeant, which was his official rank at retirement from the Army National Guard in 2005.
However, Gov. Walz still hasn’t owned up to his false claim – at least not in his biography posted on the state government’s website of the governor of Minnesota.
Despite the strong public condemnation of Walz’s embellishment, the governor’s website still strongly implies that Walz retired as a command sergeant major:
“After 24 years in the Army National Guard, Command Sergeant Major Walz retired from the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion in 2005.”
Walz failed to fulfill both the required time of service and mandatory coursework to qualify for command sergeant major, so his rank was reduced to master sergeant.
On Thursday, in a story titled “Harris campaign tweaks Walz biography amid scrutiny of military credentials,” Politico reported that the Harris campaign has “axed a reference to Walz as a ‘retired command sergeant major’ and now says that he once served at the command sergeant major rank.”
Walz’s original biography on the campaign website claimed Walz was “the son of an Army veteran and a retired Command Sergeant Major in the Army National Guard himself,” Politico reports.
In a nuanced revision, Walz’s biography on the Harris campaign’s website now reads:
“The son of an Army veteran who served as a command sergeant major, Walz was the ranking member on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, where he passed legislation to help stem veterans’ suicides.”