Senate hopeful Herschel Walker said he was a University of Georgia graduate, but that wasn’t true. The Georgia Republican said he was his high school’s valedictorian, but that wasn’t true. He said he was the founder of a charity for veterans, but that wasn’t true.
And as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, Walker has also said he had a background in law enforcement, and that apparently wasn’t true, either.
U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker regularly praises police officers. But was Walker in law enforcement himself? In at least three speeches delivered before he entered politics, Walker claimed he was, the AJC’s Shannon McCaffrey reports.
In one speech, Walker told a U.S. Army audience about a 2001 incident. “I worked in law enforcement, so I had a gun,” he claimed. In 2017, he specifically said, “I work with the Cobb County Police Department.”
There’s reason to believe otherwise. The Cobb County Police Department told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution it has no record of Walker working with the department. The Republican’s campaign said he was “an honorary deputy” — a point the Cobb sheriff’s office could not confirm — though a former DeKalb County district attorney said the title was meaningless, even if true.
Being an “honorary deputy,” a local prosecutor said, is like having “a junior ranger badge.”
As recently as 2019, Walker also told an audience, “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?”
Walker has never been an FBI agent. His campaign said he spent a week at an FBI school in Quantico, but a week does not an agent make. (He couldn’t have been an agent anyway, since agents are required to have college degrees, and Walker doesn’t have one, even though he’s claimed otherwise.)
The only meaningful experience the Georgia Republican appears to have with law enforcement was a 2001 incident in which the former athlete “talked about having a shoot-out with police.” Around the same time, Walker’s therapist called the police to say he was “volatile,” armed, and scaring his estranged wife.
In politics, candidates occasionally inflate their resumes a bit, putting positive spins on their experiences, but this is a qualitatively different dynamic: Walker has publicly presented himself as having a background that bears little resemblance to his actual life. Perhaps, some might argue, these obvious misstatements aren’t as important as the other qualities he brings to Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. The trouble, of course, is that Walker’s other qualities won’t help: As we’ve discussed, the Republican has pushed weird election conspiracy theories; he’s repeatedly struggled to talk about important issues; and voters have also recently learned about allegations of domestic violence and other dangerous personal behavior from his past. Republican primary voters in Georgia were obviously unmoved by all of this — Walker recently defeated his next closest GOP primary rival by nearly 55 points — and polling suggest he will be a highly competitive general election candidate against Sen. Raphael Warnock in the fall. But that doesn’t make the scope of the candidate’s false claims any less extraordinary.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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