Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy keeps getting caught lying about his past

Recent reporting has contradicted claims from Montana Republican U.S. Senate nominee Tim Sheehy about why he left the U.S. Navy and whether or not he experienced a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a national park. These are the latest in a long series of news reports debunking the former business executive’s statements about his past.

Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and former aerospace company CEO, is challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. John Tester in the November election. Over the course of the campaign, Sheehy has touted himself as a successful businessman and veteran who “answered the call to serve our nation.”

Local and national media outlets have disproven much of the biographical information Sheehy has provided to voters.

Sheehy claimed in his 2023 memoir “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting” that his resignation from the Navy in 2019 was for medical reasons. NBC News reported on Oct. 24, however, that it had obtained his discharge paperwork and that the redacted document indicated that Sheehy resigned voluntarily, with no medical conditions indicated. A campaign spokesperson told the network, “Tim Sheehy was honorably discharged from the Navy after being declared medically unfit to continue to serve as a Navy SEAL in 2014,” but did not address the contradictory records.

In April, the Washington Post reported that Sheehy had pointed to his right arm at a December 2023 campaign event and claimed, “I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” but that in October 2015 he had claimed to have accidentally shot himself in the arm while visiting Glacier National Park with his family. Sheehy was cited at the time for illegally discharging a weapon based on his statement to a park ranger, but told the Post that he had lied to the ranger, fabricating the story to avoid a possible investigation into a 2012 bullet wound during his time serving in Afghanistan. “I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did,” he said.

On Oct. 21, the Associated Press published an account from former Park Service ranger Kim Peach, accusing Sheehy of lying about what happened. Peach recounted visiting Sheehy in the hospital and determining that a round had been fired from Sheehy’s gun. “He knows the truth and the truth isn’t complicated. It’s when you start lying things get complicated,” Peach told the AP. Sheehy’s campaign dismissed his claim, calling it a “defamatory story.”

A Sheehy campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The two reports follow a lengthy series of other false claims by Sheehy:

• He misled voters about his business record, claiming to have been a successful CEO even though he resigned from the aerospace company he founded after it posted a net loss of $77 million in its 2023 earnings report.
• He claimed at a July 2024 campaign event that he and his wife had been living “below the poverty line” when he started Bridger Aerospace. The Guardian reported in September that Sheehy’s memoir contradicted this, noting that they started the company with a $400,000 nest egg. Though he claimed to have “bootstrapped” the business on his own, he acknowledged receiving $600,000 from family members.
• Though Sheehy claimed, “I grew up in rural Minnesota,” in an October 2023 podcast interview, the Daily Beast reported in April that he had actually lived in a suburban lake house in Shoreview, just 15 minutes from St. Paul. 
• The Daily Montanan reported in August that Sheehy claimed to have parachuted in Glacier National Park as part of his military training; however, a park official said this would not have been allowed, and the military denied any such training exercises had taken place.
• The same paper published a story in September stating that at least four passages of Sheehy’s book appeared to have been plagiarized.
• When filing his mandatory personal financial disclosure statement, Sheehy improperly omitted his position on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center, a conservative think tank that advocates for the privatization of public lands, according to a June HuffPost report. A campaign spokesperson told the outlet that he has since stepped down from the position and said: “This omission was an oversight. We are working on amending the report.” In September, HuffPost reported that Sheehy’s campaign had apparently doctored an image in a campaign ad to remove the group’s name and logo from the shirt he was wearing. 

On Oct. 22, the Tester campaign held a press conference featuring Montana military veterans who were upset with Sheehy’s false claims about his military service.  

“Now that Sheehy’s former SEAL colleague has come forward to dispute the fact that his gunshot wound was from Afghanistan, it doesn’t seem a stretch to call this a case of stolen valor,” said Marine and Army Special Forces veteran Michael Jarnevic of Missoula. “I respect Tim Sheehy’s service, but he’s too dishonest to represent our beloved Montana in the U.S. Senate.”

“I’m a combat veteran who received a Purple Heart, and we have a phrase for the kind of lies Tim Sheehy is telling: Stolen valor,” said Mike Lawson, a Butte resident and Marine Corps veteran. “Tim Sheehy’s dishonesty with Montanans about his military service is indefensible. If Sheehy won’t be honest about this, he won’t be honest about anything else.”