Montana GOP U.S. Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy is again facing pushback over his account of sustaining a bullet wound in his arm while deployed overseas.
Sheehy, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who is looking to flip Democratic incumbent Senator Jon Tester’s seat, has focused much of his campaign on his military record, including recounting a time he was wounded in 2012 while fighting in Afghanistan. The injury reportedly left the bullet lodged in his arm.
The story, however, has been repeatedly questioned. In April, The Washington Post reported that, according to government records, Sheehy had told a National Park Service ranger in October 2015 that he accidentally shot himself in the right arm with his Colt .45 while on a family trip to Glacier National Park. The shooting resulted in a citation for illegally discharging his weapon in a national park.
That same ranger, Kim Peach, has now come forward, telling the Post and several other news outlets in interviews published on Friday that he is sure Sheehy shot himself. Peach, who no longer works for the park service, said he spoke with Sheehy while he was being treated in the hospital in 2015, and that the Senate hopeful had told hospital staff at the time that he had a bullet lodged in his right arm from the incident.
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“At the time, he was obviously embarrassed about it,” Peach said in an interview with the Associated Press (AP) published Friday. “And you know, he admitted to what I was there for—the gun going off in the park. He knows the truth and the truth isn’t complicated. It’s when you start lying things get complicated.”
A spokesperson for Sheehy adamantly denied Peach’s claims, telling AP that it was a “defamatory story.”
“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,” Sheehy spokesperson Katie Martin told the outlet.
But Peach was not the only source to raise questions about Sheehy’s story. A former SEAL colleague of the Senate candidate, Dave Madden, told The New York Times that Sheehy never mentioned a gunshot wound to him while serving together, and was certain that Sheehy “would have done so in a conversation they had during their deployment if he had indeed been wounded.”
Newsweek reached out to Sheehy’s campaign via email late Friday night for comment.
When pushback on his story first arose in April, Sheehy said that he lied to the Park Service about shooting himself to protect his former SEAL unit from facing a potential military investigation, adding that he was not sure if the bullet injury he said was from 2012 was the result of friendly fire or from enemy ammunition and, therefore, never reported the incident to his superiors.
Sheehy said he went to the hospital in October 2015 to be treated for wounds he suffered after falling during a hike, and had told hospital staff that he had a bullet in his arm, which prompted his interview with a ranger.
“I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did,” Sheehy told The Washington Post in the spring, noting that he paid a $525 fine.
Sheehy’s Montana U.S. Senate race could be pivotal in determining which party controls the upper chamber of Congress next year. Polling has shown that the GOP candidate is poised to take the seat from Tester, a three-time Democratic senator. In a survey conducted by the Times from September 29 to October 8, Sheehy was ahead by 8 percentage points (52 percent to 44 percent). According to FiveThirtyEight’s tracking, Sheehy is up 5.3 points on average across state polling.
Most election models have projected Republicans to take control of the Senate come November, although Democrats have set their sights on potential upset races in Texas and Florida, where momentum is building against GOP Senators Ted Cruz and Rick Scott.
Sheehy has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, who said in a post to Truth Social in February that Sheehy is “an American Hero and highly successful businessman.”
