Mother Jones illustration; Ben Allan Smith/The Missoulian/AP; J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Last week, Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor and Donald Trump supporter this year, wanted to give Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy a chance to explain himself. For the past year, in a pivotal campaign to flip the Senate, Sheehy had been embroiled in a scandal involving potentially stolen valor that has dogged him for most of his campaign.
Sheehy says he was shot in Afghanistan; there is a good deal of evidence that is a lie. As the Washington Post revealed in April, Sheehy told a park ranger in 2015 that the bullet in his arm came from accidentally shooting himself in Glacier National Park.
“So, just to be clear,” Kelly asked, “Did you shoot yourself in the arm?”
Sheehy told Kelly his opponent’s campaign was based on “character assassination.” But, mostly, he obfuscated. Kelly kept pressing on whether he was shot in Afghanistan or the state park: “Which is it?”
Sheehy insisted he hadn’t actually shot himself, despite having paid a $500 fine for illegally firing a gun in a national park and pleading for leniency in a handwritten note.
“Are there medical records where the ER can say, ‘We did not treat a gunshot wound?” Kelly followed up. Sheehy said there weren’t, even though he’d previously suggested there were.
“So confusing,” Kelly said, clearly perplexed.
In the end, it didn’t matter, Montana voters wanted a Republican. They chose Sheehy over Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana), the famously seven-fingered farmer who has represented Montana since 2007. Tester’s defeat signals the end of an era: Come January, there will be no Democratic Senators representing red states in the West.
Sheehy’s botched response helped explain why his campaign went to extreme lengths to hide him from reporters this year. Despite initially seeming like a dream Republican recruit—young, rich, former Navy SEAL—Sheehy proved to be about as compelling as a cardboard cutout.
Sheehy’s ideology more broadly is not clear, either. “I don’t really know what he believes and from what I can tell,” one Republican operative told Vanity Fair, “he doesn’t know either.” Sheehy, who is originally from Minnesota and moved to Montana a decade ago, had never run for office before being anointed by state and national Republicans to run against Tester. Nor did he write or say much about his politics for years.
That left the scandal as one of the few things to talk about. In his book and on the campaign trail he said that a bullet in his right arm was from being shot in combat in Afghanistan. But as the Washington Post revealed in April, Sheehy told a park ranger in 2015 that the bullet in his arm came from accidentally shooting himself in Glacier National Park.
In responding to Kelly, Sheehy claimed that his campaign had discussed the incident “at length, repeatedly, with every media outlet for the last year.” That wasn’t true, either. I know because I went to great lengths to give Sheehy’s campaign the chance to substantiate his story. As I reported in September:
I reached out to Sheehy’s campaign on September 3 asking if they would be able to provide any more records to support the candidate’s account, or if they would make someone available to defend Sheehy’s story on or off-the-record. The campaign did not respond to the email or a follow-up sent [weeks later].
On Wednesday, I emailed [Daniel] Watkins, who, according to his official bio, is a “nationally ranked trial lawyer and reputation counselor specializing in high-stakes crisis and defamation cases.” Watkins confirmed that he is representing Sheehy, and asked to review the request I sent to the campaign. He did not respond after receiving it.
Since that story came out, Kim Peach, the park ranger who Sheehy told in 2015 that he shot himself, has spoken on the record to the Post and the New York Times. “I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day,” Peach told the Times. He met Sheehy at the hospital that day and remembers the candidate showing him the weapon. It was fully loaded aside from the one bullet that is most likely in Sheehy’s arm today. A Navy SEAL who served closely with Sheehy also told the Times he believes Sheehy is lying and that Sheehy never brought up being shot in the arm in Afghanistan.
Not surprisingly, there are other issues with the biography of a candidate who appears to be willing to lie about being wounded in combat. The wildlife firefighting business he founded has been hemorrhaging money and its finances leave many reasons to doubt his claims about his business acumen. His Little Belt ranch looks a lot like one of the lifestyle plays that so many longtime native Montanans resent for helping to drive up prices in the state.
The good news for Sheehy is that he won’t have to go before Montana voters for another six years. Maybe it will be enough time to find those medical records.