A top Democrat and Harris presidential campaign surrogate, has, like Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, exaggerated his military record and other facts about his past.
The New York Times disclosed this week that Maryland Governor Wes Moore said he earned the Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan and claimed he was a member of the nonexistent Maryland College Football Hall of Fame. He also claimed he was raised in Baltimore.
Those claims are false, the Times reported.
The revelation is yet another blow to the Harris campaign. In early August, the team was left reeling when it was forced to confess that Walz did not serve in combat as he claimed, and that he did not, again as claimed, retire from the Minnesota National Guard as a command sergeant major.
Now Moore, a key Harris backer and possible veep candidate, must defend his claims.
No Bronze Star; Paperwork Never Went Through
The bruising report in the Times does little good for team Harris. Walz’s past prevarications already plague the campaign.
“When Wes Moore ran for governor of Maryland in 2022, questions about whether he had claimed to have been awarded a Bronze Star for his Army service in Afghanistan hovered over his campaign,” the Times report began:
For reasons that remain unexplained, two television interviewers, Gwen Ifill and Stephen Colbert, had wrongly introduced him years earlier as a recipient of the award. Mr. Moore failed to correct them, even as he and his aides insisted he had never told anyone he had a Bronze Star.
Moore claimed he received the award while applying for a White House fellowship in 2006 during the Bush 43 administration. He was 27.
“For my work, the 82nd Airborne Division have awarded me the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Action Badge,” the Times quoted from the application. The newspaper filed a Freedom of Information request to get it.
“However, when Mr. Moore submitted the application in January 2006, he had not been awarded either the Bronze Star or the Combat Action Badge,” the Times continued:
He was awarded the badge in May 2006 for an episode the previous December, but there is no record showing that he ever received a Bronze Star, an Army spokeswoman said.
Mr. Moore’s old claim has come to light as his national profile has risen. Vice President Kamala Harris included him in the first round of candidates vetted to be her running mate — questions about the Bronze Star did not come up, Mr. Moore said, while the Harris campaign declined to comment. He also gave a prominent, well-received speech last week at his party’s convention.
And as Republicans accuse the man Ms. Harris ultimately chose as her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, of exaggerating his military record, the vice president’s campaign has dispatched Mr. Moore to defend him on cable television.
Moore told the Times his claim was “an honest mistake,” and that he should have corrected the two interviewers. He also shifted blame to a good friend and superior who told him to claim he had the award.
Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel “said that Mr. Moore had at first objected to the idea of mentioning the Bronze Star,” the Times reported:
The general said he had told Mr. Moore that he and others had approved the medal, that it was appropriate to include in his application and that it would be processed by the time his fellowship began.
“‘You’ve got to include it,’” General Fenzel recalled advising Mr. Moore. “‘If you are selected as a White House fellow, you’re going to be wearing it whenever you’re wearing your uniform.’”
Fenzel told the Times that he was unaware that Moore didn’t receive the award and would refile the recommendation.
Still, the Times reported, the general said that by
“the letter of the absolute law,” the Bronze Star should not have been included on the application. He said that at the time, he had no doubt the award would be approved. “I had never seen it signed by all of the appropriate individuals and then not be processed,” he said.
Falsely claiming to have received military decorations is called “Stolen Valor” and is against the law.
Other Questions
But the claim about the Bronze Star, which Moore apparently will receive if Fenzel’s refiled paperwork goes through, isn’t the only question about Moore’s past.
Though born in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Moore “had repeatedly called himself a Baltimore native” during his 2022 campaign. In fact, he was raised in the Bronx, in New York City. He didn’t live in Baltimore until he attended Johns Hopkins University.
“He also raised eyebrows that year for not correcting a 2006 interviewer who said he had been inducted into a Maryland hall of fame for football (such an institution does not exist),” the Times continued:
The claim about a football hall of fame came up in the biography on the 2006 application to be a White House fellow: Mr. Moore wrote that he “was named to the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame.” …
Mr. Moore was not inducted into any football hall of fame.
Moore blamed that fib on another mentor, Chris Ogeneski, a Johns Hopkins football coach, the Times reported.
“I made that edit myself,” Ogeneski told the Times. “It would have been for brevity.”
The Times did not explain why Ogeneski edited Moore’s application.
Walz Fibs
Moore’s story compounds the Harris campaign’s embarrassing admissions about Walz.
As soon as Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris named Walz her running mate, two of his former colleagues revealed in a paid letter to a newspaper that Walz falsely claimed to have retired from the Minnesota National Guard as a command sergeant major. In fact, he retired as a master sergeant. The two retired command sergeant majors also revealed that Walz retired just before his unit was to deploy to Iraq.
Worse still, in a rant about gun control, Walz said, “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
Walz never carried anything in war because he never went to war. Walz and the campaign claim he “misspoke.”
Maybe, but he did retire from the National Guard just as his unit was to deploy to Iraq.
“When were you ever in war?” GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance asked:
When was this … 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. Do not pretend to be something that you’re not. … I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did.
Walz has also lied about his drunk-driving arrest in 1995 and, strangely, about the method he and his wife used to conceive their children.
H/T: Daily Caller
