Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, one of the GOP’s top recruits for 2024, has been telling inconsistent accounts of how he received a gunshot wound in his arm.
The 38-year-old challenger to vulnerable Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) has previously claimed he was wounded by a gunshot in combat, but a Washington Post story on a previously unreported incident has made the claim even more suspect.
Sheehy told the paper he lied to a National Park Service ranger about shooting himself in the arm in 2015, claiming “I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did.”
Sheehy said he lied to the ranger about illegally discharging a firearm in order to protect his former platoon members from an investigation into the gunshot wound he maintains occurred in Afghanistan back in 2012, not in Montana’s Glacier National Park.
Sheehy told The Post he’s not sure if the wound came from hostile or friendly fire. However, one of the surgeons The Post consulted about an X-ray the Sheehy campaign provided said he’s “doubtful” the gunshot wound was from a military-level assault rifle, and that it more likely came from a handgun.
Sheehy received both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart over separate incidents in Afghanistan, and neither of those are in dispute or involved any friendly fire, according to the report.
The candidate insisted he did not fire a weapon in the park, telling the paper he fell on a bike and injured himself badly enough to go to an emergency room. The park ranger got involved once he disclosed he had a bullet wound in his arm, Sheehy said.
In Sheehy’s 2023 memoir “Mudslingers,” he wrote in one passage about being shot multiple times in Afghanistan, yet in another, described only being hit by a bullet once. In the ranger’s written description of the 2015 incident, Sheehy recalled being shot by his Colt .45 revolver in the Logan Pass parking lot after it tumbled down a pile of gear before hitting the ground and firing into his arm.
The ranger, who spoke with The Post under the condition of anonymity, said Sheehy recounted feeling lucky the bullet didn’t strike his wife or children who were with him that day.
In Sheehy’s telling of events to the paper, he said he fell on his arm after slipping on some ice and told hospital workers, “You know, hurt my arm. You know, there is a gunshot wound in there. … I just need to take a look at it and make sure everything’s okay.” This was all surprising to the ranger in his interview with The Post, describing Sheehy having the gun holstered in his vehicle that day with the chamber fully loaded except for one bullet.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Sheehy’s campaign for comment.
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