‘So Confusing’: Montana GOP Senate Candidate Gives Shifting Explanations About Gunshot Wound

Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy offered shifting explanations for a gunshot wound he’d sustained on his arm in a new interview on Friday — a controversy that has nagged his campaign against Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana).
Last month, Kim Peach, a former U.S. Park Service ranger, came forward publicly and said that Sheehy accidentally shot himself with a gun on a family trip in 2015 at Glacier National Park in Montana — contradicting the former Navy SEAL’s campaign bio, which says he was “wounded in combat.”
Recently, Sheehy has claimed that he actually lied to the ranger in 2015, telling Peach that he’d accidentally shot himself, in order to conceal the fact that he may have obtained the bullet wound during a friendly-fire incident while deployed abroad.
Asked Friday if there were medical records to prove his story, Sheehy told former Fox News host Megyn Kelly there is “not an extensive medical record” from his emergency room hospital visit. He said he had “internal bleeding” after the bullet in his arm became dislodged after he fell while on a hike in the park.
“There’s not a whole lot to talk about,” Sheehy said, calling the story “a distraction.”
“So confusing,” Kelly responded during an interview with Sheehy on her SiriusXM radio program.
Sheehy has also offered contradictory explanations for who may have been responsible for the gunshot wound.
In his interview with Kelly on Friday, the 37-year-old GOP Senate hopeful suggested that he may have been shot by an Afghan ally in a friendly-fire incident. He called the environment at the time “messy” and described the challenges of operating alongside Afghan forces, saying it was “very, very common where you’d have Afghans who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would end up shooting friendly forces.”
“It was a hazardous environment when you’re dealing with actual hostile forces … but half the time, you’ve also gotta have one eyeball looking at our partner forces,” he added.
But in his 2023 memoir, Sheehy wrote he was “struck by a friendly fire ricochet bullet” by a fellow SEAL who he wanted to shield from repercussions.
“I didn’t want the teammate who had fired the shot, a total stud who went on to have a successful career as a SEAL, to be punished officially or reputationally ― by an accident that was in no way his fault,” Sheehy wrote in the book. “It wasn’t even a tough or dangerous mission; it was a milk run, just like this training flight, but it went bad quickly.”
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When the Post asked Sheehy about that passage in his book in April, he said he was not certain whether he was shot by friendly fire or by whom, describing an incident where his team came under fire at night.
“To be very clear, I don’t know where the bullet came from,” Sheehy said. “Sometimes people find that hard to believe, but in Hollywood, they make it look like [in] a gunfight everyone knows exactly what’s going on. … That’s just not how it goes down.”
Meanwhile, the ranger, Peach, told The New York Times earlier this month he was “100 percent sure [Sheehy] shot himself that day” in 2015. He recalled unloading Sheehy’s gun at the time and “finding five live rounds and the casing of one that had been fired,” as the Times reported.
Republicans have dismissed the allegation on the basis that Peach has a history of supporting Democrats.
Polls show Sheehy leading Tester in a critical race that could determine which party controls the Senate next year. The three-term incumbent senator is trying to pull off an upset in a state Donald Trump won by 16 points in the 2020 election.