New Jersey gubernatorial hopeful Mikie Sherrill claims she doesn’t know what divulging her military disciplinary records “would even look like” and isn’t clear what files people are after.
The North Jersey Democratic congresswoman has faced mounting pressure, including from her rival Jack Ciattarelli, to release her military docs so that the public can get better insights about her role in the 1992 Naval Academy cheating scandal.
“[I’m] not even sure what that would look like,” the congresswoman told the Philadelphia Inquirer in a sitdown with the paper’s editorial board.
“This was a big thing that took place at the school, and so there’s hundreds of files and hundreds of interviews and stuff like that,” she went on.
Last month, news broke that Sherrill had been barred from walking during her class’s commencement from the Naval Academy in 1994 due to involvement in the elite school’s cheating scandal.
Sherrill claimed that she was barred from walking at graduation because she “didn’t turn in some of my classmates,” but she had since changed her story.
For example, when asked how investigators knew she failed to rat out classmates, Sherrill stated that after sitting down with investigators, “I told them what I knew.”
Some of her fellow Naval Academy alumni have speculated that there’s likely more to the story, including possible additional disciplinary proceedings against her over the cheating scandal.
During her sit-down with the Inquirer, Sherrill reiterated that she has no intention of releasing those files, accusing Ciattarelli of “trying to go on a witch hunt throughout a bunch of military files.”
“[I’m] in no way going to help him do something like that when he’s already shown he’s inappropriately using files and releasing unredacted military files,” she declared to the outlet.
That’s a reference to a CBS report detailing how a Ciattarelli ally had made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the National Archives and Records Administration for her military records.
The file that the National Archives released included personal information such as her Social Security number, that were supposed to have been redacted. A watchdog is now probing the debacle.
Sherrill also came prepared for a question about her legislative priorities — a query that tripped her up in a May interview, drawing a jumbled response that became a damning ad for Ciattarelli.
“I am going to make sure that we are building out the energy plan for the state,” Sherrill told the Inquirer without skipping a beat, before laying out a specific plan for executive action and work with the state legislature to tackle soaring energy costs.
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