Retired Command Sergeant Major Tom Behrends flatly called out Democrat vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) for claiming he was also a retired command sergeant major when he was not, in an exclusive interview with Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily on Monday.
“He is not one,” Behrends told host Mike Slater. “He didn’t finish the school that [when] you get selected to be in an E-9 position, you sign a memorandum of understanding that you’re going to finish the academy, [the] United States Army Sergeant Majors Academy.”
“You’re going to stay in [the Army] two years after that because the military’s got a lot of money invested in you, which is taxpayers’ money. And then if you don’t, if you don’t do that, you basically get reduced to master sergeant and you’re, that’s where you’re at. You’re never, you are never given that opportunity ever again that I know of,” Behrends added.
Behrends had to replace Walz on a deployment that he bailed out of in 2005. The governor knew by March 2005 that he would deploy but then decided to retire from the Army, leaving his unit without its top enlisted leader. While Walz was serving provisionally as a command sergeant major of the unit, he lost that rank when he retired without completing the requirements to retain that rank.
Behrends said, despite Walz not being a retired command sergeant major, he was “campaigning ruthlessly to trick the public into thinking he was higher ranked than he was.”
Behrends first alerted the public to Walz’s deception in 2018 when he was running for governor of Minnesota. However, it did not penetrate to a national audience until Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent selection of Tim Walz as her running mate.
He said one guy did try to alert the public earlier, and Walz tried to argue he was disrespecting a “fellow veteran.”
“He’s a military imposter, is what he is,” he said, explaining the different categories of imposters.
“There’s a civilian version of it that buys a uniform at Goodwill and puts it on and walks around and acting like he’s something he’s not,” Behrends said.
“And then you have the military ones that that do a higher rank than they are, or they might have more medals or ribbons than they actually earned, or they might have service stripes that show they put in more years or whatever. But, you know, he’s in that same category, and he literally has done it for political gain,” he added.
“He had the media in Minnesota under his thumb, and he kind of kept the narrative going,” he added.
“We finally drug him, drug him out of there into the light, and everybody can see him now,” he said.
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