‘That Is Absolutely False!’ CNN Correspondent Calls out Gov. Tim Walz’s Claim He ‘Carried’ Weapons ‘in War’

He said we shouldn‘t allow weapons that, ‘I used in war’ to be on America‘s streets. Well, I wonder Tim Waltz, when were you ever in war? When was this — what was this weapon that you carried into war, given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq, and he has not spent a day in a combat zone? What bothers me about Tim Walz is the Stolen Valor garbage. Do not pretend to be something that you‘re not.”
[Clip ends]

KEILAR: “And with us now is our Tom Foreman. And Tom, you have a fact check on this for us.”
FOREMAN: “Yeah. As you’d expect, often with team Trump out there, there‘s some truth, there is some falsehood in it. Let‘s start with the initial claim there. The notion that somehow what Tim Walz did was dodge going to service, he was in the Guard for 24 years, J.D. Vance was in the Marines for four years. Yes, while he was in there, he filed papers to run for Congress in February of 2005. He retired from his Guard unit that May. The orders to deploy did not come until two months after that. So the claim that he was somehow dodging going over here after 24 years of service and saying, ‘Well, I just don‘t want to go to combat,’ there‘s just no evidence to back that up right now. Did J.D. Vance go and serve over there? Yes, he did go, as he said he did. And Tim Walz has said he thanks J.D. Vance for his service and honors that service. That‘s one part of it. The second part of it, though, is this notion about — the claim about being in actual combat. That‘s different. Walz did make a comment speaking to a group, he‘s done it a couple of times, where he has used language that has suggested that he carried weapons in a fighting situation. As you know, with your contact with the military, I know from coming from a military family, there is a difference between being in a combat area, being involved at a time of war, and actually being in a position where people are shooting at you. There is no evidence that at any time Governor Walz was in a position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was. So that is absolutely false when he said that about — about gun rights out there. The campaign has essentially come forward to say, look, he had a long career, he would never want to purposely mislead people about this, is what campaigns tend to say. And I‘m sure we haven‘t heard the end of this, but it‘s an interesting argument that brings to mind past conflicts we‘ve had in politics where military people start going at each other and then you start saying, ‘Well, what is the basis for this? How much of it is true and what are we to draw from that as voters?’”
KEILAR: “Yeah, sort of besmirching each other’s service, right? In this case, yeah, the quote was, ‘We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.’ And certainly for someone that wasn’t familiar with their record, they might draw a different conclusion.”
FOREMAN: “And people who aren‘t aware of the nuances of that language, ‘Carried in war’ to most of us means, ‘I carried it into a search situation where I was shooting at other people, they were shooting back at me.’ Other people might say, ‘Well, it was a wartime. I was posted forward, I was deployed.’ The fact that that never happened — my father served in Korea. I have pictures of him serving on post, holding his weapon behind sandbags. He was never shot at, nor did he ever shoot at anybody else. So, he can say he served in war. He never really did because it wasn‘t combat as such.”