Montana GOP candidate Tim Sheehy says no records exist to prove the story of his gunshot wound

Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy struggled in a new interview to come clean about the circumstances surrounding a 2015 incident in a national park that led to his treatment for a gunshot wound and receiving a fine.

In it interview with radio host and former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, which was posted online Thursday, left Sheehy Kelly confused, and she warned him that Montana voters were unclear about what was happening. “I just want to give you the chance to explain yourself, because this is their closing message. It’s all about this incident with — voters are confused. … It’s so confusing,” she told him.

Controversy looms over a crucial Senate race in Montana that both parties see as crucial to capturing the majority in the final days of a hotly contested election.

The questions stem from various accounts Sheehy has given of a bullet lodged in his right arm.

All accounts agree that as first reported by The Washington Post this spring, Sheehy went to the hospital after his gun went off in Glacier National Park in 2015 (firing a weapon is illegal in a national park).

Sheehy was approached by a park ranger that day who responded to a call about a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the ranger wrote in a citation at the time, and has since said publicly. The ranger said Sheehy told him he had accidentally shot himself in the arm, and Sheehy then went to the hospital for treatment.

Sheehy now says he was never shot that day in 2015. Instead, he says, he was injured during a fall on the hike and sought treatment for a bullet already in his arm that he received in Afghanistan during his time serving as a Navy SEAL, a story he has told on the campaign trail.

Sheehy said he sought treatment the day of the hike in Glacier National Park because he was concerned the bullet, which was still in his arm, had become dislodged. Crucially, he said he did not report being wounded in combat, either during his service or after his glacier injury, because it was the result of a friendly fire incident and he did not want his unit to endure a longer examination of what amounted to a small wound, a claim he repeated in the interview with Kelly.

He got a $525 ticket for the gun that went off in Glacier National Park and paid it, he told the Post in April, to avoid an investigation of his device.

Kelly pressed Sheehy this week for any medical records that would help corroborate his account of what happened; Sheehy responded that those records do not exist.

“There’s not — I mean, that’s the point,” Sheehy said. “You go and check it and you go. There isn’t a comprehensive medical record for any of these things.”

Kelly replied: “It’s so confusing.”

Kelly asked Sheehy directly about the injury in the park: “Just to be clear, did you shoot yourself in the arm?”

“No, it was never the allegation that — the point is, you know, it was a friendly fire ricochet downrange that was not reported at the time,” Sheehy said.

Democrats fighting to help Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., win a fourth term against long odds in deep-red Montana have accused Sheehy of not being honest about either incident and called on him to release medical and military records to corroborate his story. They have also said he must have lied about his injury, either to his military command during his service or to park rangers and local law enforcement in the wake of the incident in Glacier National Park.

In the conversation with Kelly, one of the few media interviews Sheehy has given as a candidate, Kelly asked the candidate if he was injured at all during his walk in the park.

“Yes, I fell and hurt my arm when we were hiking,” he said. “So that’s why I went, because I could feel the ball dislodge when I, when I, when I fell and fell on my arm, you could feel the ball dislodge. And then went to the emergency room to say, hey, look, you know, I’ve got internal bleeding going on here. I have injured my arm. Can you take a look at this? Make sure nothing serious happens here.”

A spokesman for Sheehy questioned the gunshot wound “attempting to tear down a combat veteran’s record.”

“The bullet in Tim’s arm was a result of his service in Afghanistan,” the Sheehy spokesman said, “Tim never reported it because he didn’t want to trigger an investigation into his team, be pulled from the battlefield and see a teammate punished. It was always about protecting a colleague in his unit who he believed might have been responsible due to friendly fire ricochet in the heat of an engagement with the enemy.”

Republicans see the Sheehy race as one of the biggest pickup opportunities in a cycle where the map of Senate seats up for election favors their party. The Republican challenger has led Tester in most public opinion polls, though Democrats insist the race is far from over. Former President Donald Trump is expected to win the state easily.

During the interview with Kelly, Sheehy described the complexity of fighting in Afghanistan with “Afghan forces embedded with us.”

“We call those green-on-blue incidents, which were actually very, very common, where you would have Afghans who would either intentionally or unintentionally end up shooting friendly forces,” he said.

Sheehy had initially said the friendly fire incident was from another SEAL, and wrote in his 2023 book “Mudslingers” that he didn’t report the gunshot in Afghanistan “because I didn’t want to be sent home and lose my team, and I wanted not that the teammate who had fired that shot, a total stud who went on to a successful career as a SEAL, should be punished—officially or reputationally—by an accident that was in no way his fault.”

He wrote in the same book that he was discharged from the military for medical reasons, but as NBC News reported last month, discharge papers indicate he resigned voluntarily and do not list any medical condition that forced him out.