More than a few Americans probably don’t know that Governor Tim Walz is a convicted criminal.
The Democratic vice presidential candidate’s reckless driving rap — while he was drunker than a sailor on shore leave — is news yet again, along with the Minnesota governor’s questionable military record.
The latest on the governor is yet another blow to the Harris presidential campaign, which has, for the last few days, dealt with questions about Walz’s military retirement just before deployment to Iraq.
Now, it must deal with Walz’s past behind the wheel. The blotto Walz was hurtling down the road 40 mph over the speed limit, apparently under the delusion that he was attempting to set a land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats.
0.128 BAC
At the time of his arrest for drunk driving on September 23, 1995, Walz was a teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, as Alpha News noted in 2022.
A state trooper saw the 31-year-old Walz in his Mazda “traveling at a high rate of speech,” the cop’s arrest report says. That high rate of speech was 96 mph. The speed limit was 55.
“A strong odor of alcoholic beverage was detected emitting from Mr. Walz breath and person,” the trooper wrote in his arrest report:
Mr. Walz was given field sobriety test which he failed. Mr. Walz submitted to a preliminary breath test which he failed. Mr. Waltz was transported to Chadron hospital where a blood test was taken. Mr. Waltz was then transported to the Dawes County jail and booked in at approximately 2:45 on 9/23/95.
The blood test showed that Walz’s blood alcohol content was 0.128, 60 percent more than the 0.08 legal limit for driving.
Walz’s attorney wangled a plea deal that got him off on a mere reckless-driving charge. In court, the attorney claimed that Walz “thought somebody was chasing him” because the trooper didn’t turn on his red light.
The attorney also told the court that Walz immediately confessed his crime to the school principal and resigned from all extracurricular activities, including coaching duties. “He also offered to resign his teaching position because he felt so bad,” the attorney explained.
The principal talked him out of resigning, and Walz saw himself as a “role model” for students.
The court told Walz could have killed either himself or someone else.
In 2006, during his first run for Congress, Walz’s campaign manager said the candidate’s hearing was to blame for the arrest and that Walz wasn’t drunk, the Post-Bulletin of Rochester reported:
Walz’s campaign manager Kerry Greeley didn’t dispute that Walz was speeding when he was pulled over that night, but she said Walz was not drunk. She attributed the misunderstanding to Walz’s deafness, a condition resulting from his years of serving as an artillerist in the Army National Guard.
“He couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him,” Greeley said.
Despite the 0.128 BAC, Greeley claimed that Walz’s hearing deficit caused balance problems.
For a puff piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Walz and his wife, Gwen, said the drunk-driving arrest was a life-changing event.
“You have obligations to people,” she told him, the newspaper reported: “You can’t make dumb choices.”
Continued the Star Tribune:
It was a gut-check moment, Walz said, an impetus to change his risk-taking ways. He no longer drinks alcohol; today his beverage of choice is a seemingly bottomless can of Diet Mountain Dew. At times, it seems to fuel Walz’s dizzying conversational style, as he moves from education policy to football, words tumbling out like coins from a slot machine.
Walz quit drinking after the arrest. What his teeth look like after years of imbibing from that “bottomless can of Diet Mountain Dew” we are not given to know.
As for the arrest itself, Walz’s police mugshot is widely available on the internet.
Military Issue
Drunk and reckless driving aside, Walz faces another serious, highly embarrassing matter: His retirement from the Army to run for Congress just before his unit was deployed to Iraq.
GOP Senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance of Ohio attacked Walz during a speech in Michigan.
“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did?” the former Marine asked. “He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”
Vance also accused Walz of Stolen Valor for something he said during a tirade against guns.
“I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt,” Walz said, noting that he has voted for “common-sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment.” But those common-sense measures aren’t enough. “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” Walz added.
But Walz never saw a shot fired in anger, Vance observed.
“When was this … what was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq?” he asked.
Noting that Walz’s claiming combat experience is “stolen valor garbage,” Vance said he would “be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did.”
Nor did Walz retire from the National Guard as a command sergeant major, as he and the Harris campaign have strongly suggested. He retired as a master sergeant.
H/T: Newsweek, NewsNation
