How the right wing responded to Tim Sheehy’s bullet wound story

If the Washington Post’s revelation that Republican U.S. Senate candidate and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy lied to a Glacier National Park ranger about the origin of a bullet wound in his arm — and that he has repeated several different versions of his combat injury history in different settings — caused any second thoughts among Sheehy’s supporter or among Republicans more broadly, they’re not showing it.

Rather, Sheehy responded to the story by attacking the Washington Post and invoking his status as a veteran to claim unfair treatment, and the rest of the conservative sphere has followed suit. That became most apparent when the Sheehy campaign published on social media screenshots of emails from Post reporters working on a follow-up story that was published Friday. 

“The smear artists @washingtonpost are writing yet another hit piece attacking me for serving my country — even asking questions about my medical history and demanding my personal records. I’m done playing the liberal media’s game — here’s how DC ‘reporters’ treat veterans,” Sheehy posted on X. 

The smear artists @washingtonpost are writing yet another hit piece attacking me for serving my country—even asking questions about my medical history and demanding my personal records. I'm done playing the liberal media's game—here's how DC "reporters" treat veterans. pic.twitter.com/m59T9wXCpP

— Tim Sheehy (@SheehyforMT) April 10, 2024

The emails show Post reporters reaching out to a campaign spokesperson to let her know they were working on a story about how Sheehy’s military service — for which he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, both unrelated to the gun wound — plays into his campaign. The reporters said they had spoken to former classmates and fellow SEALs who fleshed out some of Sheehy’s background.

To refresh: the Post’s original story, published last weekend, revealed that Sheehy has made what the Post called “puzzling statements” about his wartime injuries. Most notably, he told a Glacier National Park ranger in 2015 that he accidentally shot himself when his revolver fell and fired in the park. When the Post reached out to ask about a citation he’d received for the incident, he said he’d lied to the ranger in order to cover up a 2012 war wound, possibly caused by friendly fire, that he’d never reported in an attempt to protect his platoonmates from a possible military investigation. Lying to federal law enforcement is a crime, but the statute of limitations has expired. 

The story he told the Post is at least inconsistent with Sheehy’s other public statements regarding his war wounds. He told the Post he wasn’t sure if his injury was the result of  friendly fire or not, but in his 2023 book, “Mudslingers,” he wrote that he was hit by a “friendly ricochet bullet.” On the campaign trail, the Post reported, Sheehy has described being shot multiple times during the course of his service. The campaign later told the Post he was “shot” three times but wounded by a bullet only once — on the other two occasions, the campaign said, bullets glanced off of his body armor and his radio. 

The facts aren’t incidental to his campaign. As the Post described in its second story, Sheehy’s war-hero image is central to his candidacy. Images of Sheehy wearing military gear and armed with military weaponry pervade his campaign advertisements. 

“I’m a war hero, a job creator, a philanthropist,” Sheehy said at one GOP event last fall, as reported by the Post. 

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Who was Tim Sheehy before he started running for Senate? Here’s what we know.

Before Tim Sheehy was the frontrunner in Montana’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate, the ex-Navy SEAL, aerial firefighter, millionaire business owner, part-time rancher and occasional political donor was a 2004 graduate of a Minneapolis-St. Paul area private high school who grew up in a lake house outside Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

by Arren Kimbel-Sannit 12.04.202304.29.2024

The extent of communications between the Post and the campaign is not entirely clear. Sheehy appears to have been fairly cooperative with the Post’s preparation of the initial piece, responding to questions through his campaign, speaking directly to reporters and connecting them with his platoonmates. 

The questions that reporters posed to Sheehy, and that the campaign posted online, appear fairly standard. They ask for a citation for Sheehy’s Purple Heart and for information about an incident Sheehy describes in “Mudslingers” in which he suffered decompression sickness during a dive exercise that ultimately led to his medical discharge from the SEALs in 2014. 

On X, Sheehy described the reporting as an attempt to discredit “every aspect of my service.” And he took issue with the Post giving him roughly 24 hours to respond to the inquiries — a fairly standard journalistic practice designed to encourage a timely response while being transparent about expectations. In the replies, one right-wing social media account posted a picture of one of the Post reporters and said he’d “be in the fetal position if he faced 1% of what [Sheehy] faced on deployment. Insane that anyone listens to these far left activists.”

Elsewhere on social media, accounts sympathetic to Sheehy identified the park ranger who spoke with the Post. The ranger, a Marine Corps veteran, acknowledged having previously supported Sheehy’s main opponent, Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, but the Post story notes that the incident took place long before Sheehy was a candidate. 

National and local Republicans followed suit in defending Sheehy.

“Only veterans understand this type of loyalty and dedication to our fellow warriors. Semper Fi @SheehyforMT we have your back!! @MTDems shame you at their peril,” Montana GOP Chair Don Kaltschmidt said on X. 

The Daily Caller, a right-wing outlet, on Wednesday published an “exclusive” claiming to show the Washington Post harassing the wife of a veteran whom the Post contacted for its story. In a voicemail left by the reporter, according to a transcript published by the Caller, the reporter was immediately apologetic about bothering the woman and said she was interested in talking to her husband, who attended the Naval Academy with Sheehy. The Daily Caller objected to the fact that the Post reporter “cold-called” the woman. 

The Sheehy campaign has branded the Post stories as products of the “liberal elite misinformation machine.” 

The Post’s follow-up — the story that Sheehy dismissed as an attempt to “discredit” his service — takes a fairly high-level look at the phenomenon of military veterans deploying their service as a platform to run for office. It acknowledges that “all political candidates must promote their work experience” and notes that Sheehy’s campaign isn’t breaking any new ground in that regard — current Republican Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke has also campaigned on his SEAL bona fides. 

The quotations from Sheehy’s former colleagues published by the Post are almost universally glowing. In explaining why Sheehy may not have regularly discussed the wound before running for office, one former platoonmate said: “His mindset was, ‘always the first one in, always the last one out,’ even when that put him in danger. At first I thought he had a death wish, but I very soon came to realize that’s just his leadership style.”

Sheehy’s campaign didn’t answer specific questions from the Post, but did provide a statement for the story. 

“Tim Sheehy humbly served our nation with honor as a Navy SEAL. He has never called himself a hero, but he served alongside plenty of them,” a spokesperson said. “His military service is well documented and is a matter of public record.”