CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski fact-checked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s 2006 campaign for what he called the misrepresenting events around his DUI arrest in 1995. Walz has sought to downplay his arrest for drunk driving in the mid-’90s, but questions about his run-in with law enforcement have continued to dog him.
On Sept. 23, 1995, when Walz was working as a teacher in his home state of Nebraska, he was pulled over for going 96 mph in a 55-mph zone. In comments to reporters in 2006, Walz’s campaign for Congress in Minnesota’s 1st District insisted he was “not drunk” and blamed a “misunderstanding” with police on “Walz’s deafness,” which his then-campaign manager said had since been “surgically corrected.”
Kaczynski rebutted Walz’s 2006 campaign statements as to DUI arrest point by point on Friday. “The campaign falsely said that he drove himself to the station, that he was allowed to drive home,” Kaczynski said. “They said the DUI charges were dropped because they were unfounded and the campaign even faulted this trooper for saying that he didn’t realize that Walz had a hearing impairment.”
“Misleading or even false representations of Walz’s 1995 DUI arrest are not the only scandal that the Walz campaign has been forced to grapple with in recent days,” the report stated.
Walz has also been criticized by veterans, including by some former Army National Guard members that served alongside him, for leaving the Guard before it was deployed to Iraq and for allegedly misrepresenting his rank. Walz, a veteran of the Minnesota National Guard, has repeatedly referred to himself as a “retired command sergeant major.” But according to the Minnesota National Guard, while Walz served as command sergeant major, “he retired as a Master Sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy.”
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo and Taylor Penley contributed to this report.
