Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, failed to correct former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi back in 2007 when the California Democrat expressed her appreciation for the freshman congressman’s service “on the battlefield.”
Walz, 60, was never deployed to an active war zone during his 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard, and he has faced accusations of “stolen valor” and embellishing his military service from Republicans since being placed on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket.
“He will speak for himself, but I want him to know how much we all appreciate his service to our country, whether it’s in the classroom or on the battlefield,” Pelosi said of Walz during a Feb. 16, 2007, press conference on Capitol Hill, video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon showed.
Walz’s lack of combat experience did not stop him from thanking Pelosi for her praise.
“Well, thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you to the leadership here,” Minnesota’s then-1st Congressional District rep said when he took the podium.
C-SPAN, the network that taped the press conference, labeled Walz as an “Afghanistan War Veteran” on its chyron.
Walz was never on the ground in Afghanistan, however, he did deploy to Italy — more than 3,000 miles away from the Taliban-run country — in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (the war in Afghanistan).
The current Minnesota governor’s only other deployment was to Norway in support of NATO.
Walz retired from the National Guard in May 2005 — as his battalion was preparing to deploy to the Iraq war zone — to run for Congress.
Earlier this week, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, 39, accused Walz of leaving his guard colleagues high and dry by retiring on the brink of their deployment.
“What was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq, and he has not spent a day in a combat zone? What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage,” Vance said in Michigan.
The Republican Ohio senator was referencing a recently resurfaced clip of Walz from 2018, in which he argued: “We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, argued that Walz shouldn’t “pretend to be something that you’re not.”
In the press conference with Pelosi, Walz also claimed his rank in the Guard was “command sergeant major,” which is false.
“As someone who’s spent their entire military career as an enlisted person, my job as a command sergeant major or as a first sergeant was solely to take care of these troops,” Walz said.
Walz did not complete the required coursework to reach the rank of command sergeant major and thus retired as a master sergeant.
On Thursday, the Harris-Walz campaign scrubbed a reference to Walz as a retired “ command sergeant major” from his official biography on its website.
Harris, responding to criticism of Walz’s National Guard service on Thursday, told reporters, “Listen, I praise anyone who has presented themselves to serve our country. And I think that we all should.”
