Former Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka (R) criticized Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, as being “terrible in crisis.”
In an interview with Fox News, Gazelka spoke about what it had been like to work with Walz and revealed that his “concern” about the governor being elected vice president is that he is “terrible in crisis” and bad when it comes to spending money.
“My concern for him as a leader, number one, is he’s terrible in a crisis,” Gazelka told the outlet. “And then how he spends money. It’s like he has no sense of what the value of a dollar is. And they just spend money until they go into debt. And so, people need to pay attention.”
Gazelka continued to speak about how Walz had failed to respond to the riots that occurred in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.
“The mayor of Minneapolis, Mayor [Jacob] Frey, said to the governor, ‘I need your help. I need the Guard,’” Gazelka told the outlet. “And that’s when the governor just sat on his hands. He froze. He didn’t do anything.”
In an interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune in August 2020, Frey blamed Walz for failing to respond to calls for help regarding the riots:
In an interview Monday, Frey said that Walz hesitated to send in the National Guard to quell the growing violence and then blamed him for allowing the city to burn.
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Frey said he immediately telephoned Walz, at 6:29 p.m., relayed information, and asked him to send in the National Guard. “We expressed the seriousness of the situation. The urgency was clear,” Frey said.
“He did not say yes,” Frey said of Walz. “He said he would consider it.”
Gazelka’s words about Walz come as the Minnesota governor has faced criticism and accusations of “stolen valor” after the biography on his website had previously implied that he had the rank of an E-9, or command sergeant major when he retired from the military.
As Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong reported:
Walz served in the Minnesota Army National Guard and retired at the rank of master sergeant, or an E-8. However, on his official website bio, he lists a higher rank that he served at for a short period that ultimately was rescinded, as he did not complete all the requirements to serve at that rank. However, his bio implies that he retired at the rank of command sergeant major, or an E-9.
The reference to Walz being a “retired command sergeant major” was later removed by the Harris campaign, which updated the biography to note that Walz had “once served at the command sergeant major rank,” Politico reported.
Walz has also faced criticism for claiming in a viral video shared by Kamala HQ on X, that he had served in war, though he had not seen combat:
I spent 25 years in the Army, and I hunt … I’ve been voting for common-sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can do CDC research … We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.
Gov. @Tim_Walz: I spent 25 years in the Army and I hunt. I’ve been voting for common sense legislation that protects the Second Amendment, but we can do background checks. We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war,… pic.twitter.com/3IVaXi2RP2
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 6, 2024
The Harris campaign issued a statement on Friday, claiming that Walz had “misspoke”:
In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the Governor misspoke. He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children.
Walz has also faced criticism over reports that have shown Walz left the military before his unit deployed to Iraq, despite knowledge that the “National Guard Public Affairs Office” had warned of a “possible mobilization of roughly 2,000 troops from the Minnesota National Guard.”