With 10 weeks remaining before Election Day, Herschel Walker has a great many choices about what he wants to talk about, and which issues he wants voters to be thinking about in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. With this in mind, as HuffPost noted, the Republican made an odd choice yesterday.
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker once again tried to falsely claim he had a law enforcement background and it didn’t go so well. On Tuesday, the former football player attempted to paint his Democratic opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, as soft on crime by posting a photo of what appears to be a special deputy sheriff card reportedly given to him by the Cobb County Sheriff’s Department. Except the card isn’t really bonafide.
In his tweet on the subject, the first-time candidate said he was “proud to serve the blue,” in reference to law enforcement, and included an image of a certificate in which he was described as an “honorary” agent.
But Walker’s pride notwithstanding, voluntarily renewing interest in one of his more glaring vulnerabilities was unwise.
As we discussed a few months ago, Walker repeatedly lied to the public about having a law enforcement background. In one speech, for example, 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.”
The evidence suggests 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.
None of this would be coming up right now, except the GOP Senate candidate apparently thought it’d be a good idea to renew the focus on this part of his background. The developments served as a reminder that Walker is not a great candidate and does not have a record to run on. Indeed, I was reminded yesterday of a brutal paragraph Politico published earlier this month, summarizing the Republican’s background. Walker, Politico noted, “has lied about his educational achievements, his participation in law enforcement and the FBI, the size and success of his business ventures, and the number of children he has. ‘He’s lied so much that we don’t know what’s true,’ a Walker adviser told The Daily Beast. ‘I’m going to blow your f’ing brains out,’ he once told his ex-wife, according to his ex-wife. He told an ex-girlfriend in 2012 that he was going to ‘blow her head off’ and then ‘blow his head off,’ according to the ex-girlfriend. And in his 2008 memoir about his multiple personality disorder, he writes about playing Russian roulette repeatedly, putting a bullet in his gun and the gun to his head and into his mouth and sitting at his kitchen table and pulling the trigger. He says he considered killing a man for the late delivery of a car he had bought, fantasizing about ‘the visceral enjoyment I’d get from seeing the small entry wound and the spray of brain tissue and blood.’” Common sense suggests someone with a background like this couldn’t possibly be a competitive candidate for statewide office. And yet, an Emerson College poll in Georgia, released yesterday, showed Walker actually leading incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. One of the most head-spinning developments in American politics in 2022 is the fact that Walker is a competitive U.S. Senate candidate.
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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