More Holes In Tim Sheehy's Accidental / Friendly Fire Shooting Story Than In His Arm
Lying liar still favored to beat Jon Tester in Senate race, because Montana.
The Washington Post Friday published an update (gift link) on that weirdass story it reported back in April, revealing that Montana’s Republican nominee for US Senate, Tim Sheehy, lied outrageously about a bullet wound in his right forearm. As it happens, the New York Times is also on the story, with additional details. (Sorry, we need to conserve our remaining Times gift links as the election gets closer.)
The only details that are in dispute are 1) how and 2) when the bullet got there, 3) who exactly he lied to, and 4) why Sheehy lied. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln … oh wait, that was a head shot.
Both stories, as we’ll see, involve new details from people who dispute Sheehy’s version of events. One is Kim Peach, a retired US Park Ranger who investigated Sheehy’s involvement in an accidental shooting in Glacier National Park in 2015. Peach spoke to both the Post and the Times. The other is Dave Madden, a former friend of Sheehy who was close to him when they were both Navy SEALs serving in Afghanistan.
First, the basics: In 2015, while he was hospitalized in Kalispell, Montana, after an incident at the national park, Sheehy told Peach — who wasn’t identified in the Post’s April story — that after a hike, he was putting his Colt .45 revolver back in his SUV when the gun slipped and fell to the pavement, discharging and wounding him. He paid a $525 fine for discharging a firearm in a national park, and that was the end of it, OK?
Except it wasn’t the end of it! Peach told the Post about the incident after he realized the guy in the TV ads was the guy from the incident in Glacier, and when reporters asked Sheehy about it, he had another explanation: He hadn’t been wounded in 2015 at the park at all!
He said he’d actually made up the story to cover up a bullet wound he received in Afghanistan in 2012. He wasn’t sure whether he was hit by the enemy or by friendly fire, but didn’t report the incident to his superiors at the time because he worried it would implicate his platoon members in a possible friendly fire incident he considered no big deal.
In this telling, he went to the ER after falling while hiking, worried the bullet had been dislodged, and told medical staff that he had a bullet in his arm, but avoided saying how it got there. He said hospital staff explained they had to report all gunshot wounds to law enforcement, so when Peach arrived to interview him, Sheehy lied to keep the truth from potentially getting his former teammates in trouble.
The story gets even weirder as reported by the New York Times, which says Sheehy’s lawyers explained that when the hospital staff told Sheehy they had to report the wound to law enforcement,
He decided to lie about it, the lawyers said, by telling both the medical staff and Mr. Peach that the bullet had come from an accidental shooting that day.
“Mr. Sheehy’s account is the only plausible one,” the lawyers said.
Plau …! Plausible!? We’re supposed to believe the ER staff couldn’t tell a three-year-old bullet wound from a fresh one? Did the fall tear up his arm exactly where the old bullet wound was, leaving doctors thinking it was a fresh gunshot wound? Had Sheehy been picking at the scab a lot for three years? It makes no damned sense at all!
The Times adds that Sheehy
declined requests to provide The Times with military medical records that might show when he received any injuries in Afghanistan, or hospital records that would reflect that the injury in Montana was a result of a fall and not a fresh gunshot wound.
And no, Sheehy won’t let you look at his arm, none of your business.
Anyhow, the Post explains why Mr. Peach, 67, has come forward to tell his story more openly. In April, the paper
allowed him to speak on the condition of anonymity at the time because he feared political retaliation. But Laura Loomer and other conservative pundits quickly shared his identity online after the story published, leading to harassment, Peach said.
Now, angry at what he sees as Sheehy’s refusal to own up to the truth, Peach is speaking on the record to lend weight to his account of what happened 9 years ago.
Peach quite simply doesn’t buy Sheehy’s explanation of the events, saying, “The truth isn’t complicated.” Peach also told the Times, “I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day.”
Peach met Sheehy at the hospital and interviewed him just after he was discharged, then went with him to his SUV in the parking lot to examine the gun. He told the Post in the spring that he had found one spent bullet casing in the cylinder, suggesting that the gun had been fired, although that detail didn’t make it into his written report. He temporarily confiscated the revolver, but returned it when Sheehy paid his fine. Back in April, Sheehy’s lawyer said that the fact that the missing bullet wasn’t mentioned in the 2015 report meant that Peach’s memory of seeing it had to be a “fabrication.”
Back in April, Sheehy himself magnanimously said he doesn’t “in any way impugn the law enforcement officer,” because “Everything he says is true to the extent of his knowledge.” But with the election so close, the Sheehy campaign is getting openly pissy about Peach, and why not, now that the rightwing online flying monkey brigade knows who he is? Campaign spokesperson Katie Martin told the Post that the former ranger is nothing but a partisan activist, calling attention to a scandalous Facebook photo where Peach wore a hat saying “Make Lying Wrong Again,” shame on him.
“Anyone trying to take away from the fact that Tim Sheehy signed up for war as a young man and spent most of his 20s in some of the most dangerous places in the world is either a partisan hack, a journalist with an agenda, or outright a disgusting person,” Martin said.
“Tim has been and will continue to be a humble servant of our great nation, our veterans, and the men and women he admirably served with,” she continued. “He got into this race to put our country first and he won’t ever let any of this slander stop him from fighting every day as Montana’s next U.S. Senator.”
Notice how none of that actually addresses the substance of the articles.
Oh, yes, and the new person who spoke to the Times, Dave Madden, knew Sheehy when they were in training to go to Afghanistan, although they were assigned to different platoons once they deployed. They stayed in touch by email, and Madden says that he met up with Sheehy again in July 2012. That would be after the April or May 2012 firefight in which Sheehy says a ricocheting bullet lodged in his arm, but
During that in-person meeting, Mr. Madden said, the two men swapped war stories about the various close conflicts with enemy fighters that they had endured. But through the entire conversation that day, he said, Mr. Sheehy never mentioned any sort of bullet wound. He said he remembers that Mr. Sheehy had his sleeves rolled up during the conversation, and there was no visible evidence of any injury to his arm.
Mr. Madden said he was surprised when Mr. Sheehy began talking more recently about having been shot that spring in Afghanistan, and that he became convinced that Mr. Sheehy had invented the story.
“It seems obvious to me and every other operator I’ve talked to about this,” Mr. Madden said, referring to other military veterans.
Not surprisingly, Sheehy’s lawyers say that conversation never took place, and that Madden too is a partisan who’s trying to destroy Sheehy. Madden has indeed taken issue with Sheehy’s politics in social media posts, so that has to prove he’s a liar somehow. For his part, Madden says he dislikes both political parties, but felt he had to speak up. Good luck with the online creeps, Mr. Madden.
[WaPo (gift link) / Photo (cropped): Tim Sheehy on Facebook]
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The creme diplomate filling for the tres leches cake set perfectly. Cakes Jr nd her friends thoroughly enjoyed it.
Ugh my busted nose is hurting again, yesterday it stared feeling better. Now it throbs and my sinuses ache. My poor nose! Not pornos. (excellent joke courtesy of Chicken.)