Oh, is the media finally catching up?
Well, sort of. Just like they have with Joe Biden, Tim Walz isn’t lying or stretching the truth.
Walz is just a “gaffe factory.”
The latest Axios article about Walz includes three new lies, or as the outlet says, gaffes.
Walz said he texted with reporters late into the night on May 15 about the negotiations over spending billions on the state’s infrastructure.
Axios asked for the texts, but Walz’s office said they don’t exist:
“I think my last text exchange was about 12:30 last night, that we were going on this,” he said on the morning of May 16.Yes, but: When Axios asked for the texts from that night about the capital investment bill using the state’s public records laws, the governor’s office said there weren’t any.Why it matters: The DFL governor’s office later told Axios he likely misspoke, but the response raised fresh questions about the administration’s approach to transparency and the state’s public records laws.
Or did the office get rid of the texts?
Oh, you know, it wasn’t the first time Walz’s administration had a problem with transparency:
Zoom out: This isn’t the first time the DFL governor, elected in 2018, has faced questions about his office’s retention and disclosure of the governor’s emails and texts.
- The nonprofit Public Record Media (PRM), which has publicly criticized the administration’s handling of such requests, has at times received hundreds of pages of responses with no apparent emails from the governor.
- In 2022, Lancaster told the group the “Governor’s decisions are made primarily in meetings with advisors.”
Plus: In 2019, his first year in office, he reneged on a campaign promise to release his daily calendars.
- His office points to an advisory opinion that classified the records as private data.
Walz had strict COVID lockdown rules. He set up a snitch line so people could tattle on their neighbors for breaking the rules.
The governor claimed “over 80% of our students missed less than 10 days of in-class learning.” (It should be FEWER, not less. Sheesh.)
The administration shut down schools from mid-March 2020 to June 2020.
Many of those students “remained in remote learning mode into 2021.”
Walz wanted to blame the burning of Minneapolis during the BLM riots on outside agitators.
He said 80% of the arrested people did not reside in Minnesota.
Even PolitiFact corrected Walz:
Within hours, local TV station KARE reported that Minneapolis-based police tallies of those arrested for rioting, unlawful assembly, and burglary-related crimes from May 29 to May 30 showed that 86% of those arrested listed Minnesota as their address. Arrestees in St. Paul broke down to 12 confirmed from Minnesota out of 18 arrested.KARE reported that of the out-of-state arrestees, one had a Facebook page that had “clearly identifiable support of white supremacy.”
Officials walked back the claim. Walz just never repeated it.
Wait. There’s more:
The notion that the violent protesters were predominantly out-of-staters took another hit the following day, when USA Today reported that “the overwhelming majority” of people who posted from a burning Minneapolis police station on May 28 and those arrested at protests lived in the Twin Cities area.USA Today scoured the feeds of more than 1,800 Twitter users who posted from within a 3-mile radius of the precinct fire and found that 85% had a history of posting inside the greater Minneapolis area before George Floyd’s death. The newspaper found a similar pattern in jail records for such cities as Detroit, Louisville, Nashville and Los Angeles.
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