Herschel Walker’s Pattern of Lies Continues — This Time Falsely Claiming He Worked in Law Enforcement

GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker continues to show Georgians he isn’t who he says he is — this time falsely claiming on multiple occasions that he worked in law enforcement, including local police departments and the FBI. It’s just the latest in Walker’s long history of false claims, which include claiming he founded a program to support veteran mental health that is actually a for-profit program facing allegations of preying on veterans, inflating his business record while touting businesses that do not exist, and lying about his education background. 

As MSNBC notes, “Walker has publicly presented himself as having a background that bears little resemblance to his actual life.”

Read up on Walker’s long pattern of lies below:

Herschel Walker said he worked in law enforcement — he didn’t

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/13/22

• “I worked for law enforcement, y’all didn’t know that either?” he said. “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?”

• It wasn’t the first time Walker said he was in law enforcement, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found while reviewing dozens of speeches and motivational talks by Walker that were posted online.

• ”I work with the Cobb County Police Department, and I’ve been in criminal justice all my life,” he said in 2017

• In 2000, he told Irving, Texas, police that he was “a certified peace officer,” according to a police report.

• And he has used his alleged law enforcement ties to justify why he has had a gun, including a 2001 incident when he pursued a man who was late delivering a car.

• “I worked in law enforcement, so I had a gun. I put this gun in my holster and I said, ‘I’m gonna kill this dude,’ ” he said at a 2013 suicide prevention event for the U.S. Army.

• The claims, which appear to have halted since he entered the U.S. Senate race, aren’t true.

• The Cobb County Police Department said it had no record of involvement with Walker. The Cobb Sheriff’s Office could not say whether he was an honorary deputy.

• Morgan said that many sheriffs in Georgia stopped handing out such honors amid fears that people would use the paperwork to impersonate police officers, a felony in Georgia.

Herschel Walker’s ties to veterans program face scrutiny

Associated Press, 5/21/22

• In interviews and campaign appearances, the former Dallas Cowboy and Heisman Trophy winner takes credit for founding, co-founding and sometimes operating a program called Patriot Support. The program, he says, has taken him to military bases all over the world.
• “People need to know I started a military program, a military program that treats (thousands) of soldiers a year,” [Walker] told Savannah TV station WTGS in February.
• But corporate documents, court records and Senate disclosures reviewed by The Associated Press tell a more complicated story. Together they present a portrait of a celebrity spokesman who overstated his role in a for-profit program that is alleged to have preyed upon veterans and service members while defrauding the government.
• The revelation marks the latest example of a far more complex reality that lies beneath the carefully curated autobiography Walker has pitched to voters.
• Patriot Support is not a charity. It’s a for-profit program specifically marketed to veterans that is offered by Universal Health Services, one of the largest hospital chains in the U.S. Walker wasn’t the program’s founder, either. It was created 11 years before Universal Health Services says it hired Walker as a spokesman, which paid him a salary of $331,000 last year.

Herschel Walker Claims to Own Companies That Don’t Exist

Daily Beast, 4/13/22

• The Republican Senate hopeful and longtime friend of Donald Trump has, for whatever reason, chosen to dramatically inflate his business record, according to a Daily Beast investigation. In doing so, Walker has established a parallel record of demonstrably false claims, many of which appear to bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever.
• While Walker’s business record has been picked over before — including in an Associated Press review of “exaggerated claims of financial success” — The Daily Beast has reviewed documents and other records that shine new light on previously unexamined, and particularly egregious, false claims.
• Those claims include running the largest minority-owned food company in the United States; owning multiple chicken plants in another state; and starting and owning an upholstery business which was also, apparently, at one point in his telling, the country’s largest minority-owned apparel company.
• The claims about the upholstery business appear particularly divorced from the truth, as that business, as Walker describes it, doesn’t appear to exist.
• That fact didn’t deter Walker from boasting again and again that it was his company, repeatedly implying sole proprietorship—even saying as recently as a speech this February that he “started” the business.
• In a 2020 interview, Walker claimed he ran “the largest minority-owned apparel company.” He added that “we do drapers and bedspreads” and “have 280 women in Greer, South Carolina.”
• Two years before that, Walker told the Dum Ass Club point-blank that he had the “largest upholstery company in the United States,” a claim so absurd it barely merits fact-checking.
• In October, he told a UFC-themed podcast, “I own a food company—that’s going to freak you out—I own the largest minority-owned food company in the United States.”
• The Daily Beast’s review shows that this is nowhere near accurate.
• By the Black Enterprise list, Walker’s company isn’t even the largest Black-owned food company in Georgia. 
• The Daily Beast asked the campaign for evidence to support the claim that the company ranks among the largest in that minority-owned category, but as of publication did not receive any.
• The AP also reported that Walker’s claim contradicts what he told the government in forgivable pandemic loan applications.
• Renaissance Man Food reported eight employees on those documents—nowhere near the 600 he told Fox Business in 2018—and received a total $180,000 in loans. Walker’s candidate financial disclosure shows he drew a $100,000 salary from the company.

GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker has been overstating his academic achievements for years

CNN, 4/1/22

• For years, Herschel Walker has told the same inspiring story: that he graduated in the top 1% of his class at the University of Georgia. He’s told the story, according to a review of his speeches by CNN’s KFile, during motivational speeches over the years and as recently as 2017. The only problem: it’s not true.
• But a CNN KFile review found that Walker himself has been repeating the claim for years. Walker’s comments in 2017, and others made over the years, show the former football star repeatedly misrepresented his academic credentials.
• “And all of sudden I started going to the library, getting books, standing in front of a mirror reading to myself,” Walker said in a 2017 motivational speech. “So that Herschel that all the kids said was retarded become valedictorian of his class. Graduated University of Georgia in the top 1% of his class.”
• That was not the only claim about Walker’s education that was adjusted on his website at the time. After a review of the revised site, CNN’s KFile found another little-noticed claim was removed that said Walker graduated valedictorian of his high school. The website now says that Walker graduated “top of his class.” The claim still remains on the Heisman Winners page for Walker.
• A 15-year review of local press coverage did not find the school naming a valedictorian until 1994 — when the paper acknowledged the school was naming a valedictorian and salutatorian for the first time in “many years.”
• Walker’s campaign did not provide evidence that Walker graduated as his high school’s valedictorian other than pointing to news articles from the early 1980s after he began his career at the University of Georgia making the claim.
• The campaign also did not provide an explanation for why it removed the claim that Walker was valedictorian from his website. When repeatedly asked if the campaign stood by the since-removed claim from his website, the Walker’s campaign manager Scott Paradise sent the same statement three times in a row which did not address KFile’s questions.
• The claim is brought up in interviews with Walker, on at least two separate occasions — with the host saying he returned to get his degree. In neither instance did Walker correct interviewers.

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