Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), who emerged Tuesday as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, will likely face new scrutiny over a 1995 DUI arrest after court records emerged to suggest he had misled the public about the case.
Walz, who was living in Nebraska at the time, was pulled over for drunk driving. He eventually reached a plea deal and admitted to reckless driving. The issue surfaced in later political campaigns, but Walz said he had not been drunk.
In 2006, when the issue emerged during Walz’s race for Congress, his campaign said that the arrest had been the result of a misunderstanding. The Post Bulletin of Rochester, Minnesota, reported:
Walz’s campaign said the arrest by a state trooper was the result of a misunderstanding caused by Walz’s deafness; his hearing since has been surgically corrected.
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Walz pleaded not guilty to the charges and sought to suppress the blood alcohol test in court, according to court papers, before agreeing to plead guilty to reckless driving. He paid a $200 fine.
Walz’s campaign manager Kerry Greeley didn’t dispute that Walz was speeding when he was pulled over that night, but she said Walz was not drunk. She attributed the misunderstanding to Walz’s deafness, a condition resulting from his years of serving as an artillerist in the Army National Guard.
However, as Alpha News reported in 2022:
Gov. Tim Walz has said in past campaigns that he wasn’t actually drunk when he was pulled over for driving under the influence in 1995, but a court transcript from the case tells a different story.
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“Mr. Walz was driving south of town on 385 in Dawes County at a high rate of speed. Actually, he was driving away from the police officer. I think that he eventually hit a speed of over 80, as I recall. When he was stopped, he was given a blood test which did show a .128 blood alcohol,” [former Dawes County Attorney Rex] Nowlan said, according to a court transcript.
Walz’s attorney, Russell Harford, later acknowledged that Walz “had been drinking” but said he was driving away from the state trooper because he “thought somebody was chasing him.”
The transcript can be found here.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
