New Reporting Puts Walker’s Repeated Lies Front & Center in #GASEN

Once again Herschel Walker is facing intense scrutiny for not being who he says he is. Yesterday, a series of new media reports highlighted Walker’s repeated false claims that he worked in law enforcement, continued inflation of his business record, and the depths of Walker’s hypocrisy around his personal history.

Read the coverage below:

As Herschel Walker’s GOP profile rises, the falsehoods mount

Washington Post, 6/14/22

• During the course of Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign… [he] has also faced blowback from critics and Democrats for false claims he made before and during his candidacy that have surfaced in recent months — from his college education and business background to his questioning of evolution and promoting a “mist” he said would “kill any covid on your body.”
   
• The latest came Monday when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on previous speeches and statements given by Walker about how he claimed in 2017 that he had worked with police in Cobb County, Ga. Two years later, Walker mentioned he was an FBI agent.
   
• “I worked for law enforcement, y’all didn’t know that either?” he said in 2019. “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?”
   
• In reality, he had not. A spokesman for the Cobb County Police Department told the Journal-Constitution, and later confirmed to The Washington Post, that it has no record of working with Walker.
   
• In December, Walker’s campaign deleted a false claim that he had graduated from college.
   
• Walker later denied that he made the false claim about his graduation status in an interview with WAGA in Atlanta — delivering a false claim in response to a false claim.
   
• “I never, I never have said that statement,” he said. “Not one time.”
   
• In January, the Daily Beast unearthed a 2020 podcast appearance from Walker, in which he promoted a “mist” that he falsely claimed would “kill any covid on your body,” even though there is no known mist or spray that can prevent covid-19.
   
• In March, Walker questioned evolution during an address at a Georgia church, asking why apes still exist if humans have evolved from them.
   
• Then, in early April, CNN reported on how Walker had been overstating his academic achievements for years. In addition to his false claim surrounding his graduation, Walker asserted at least twice in 2017 that he was his high school’s valedictorian and graduated “in the top 1 percent” at Georgia.
   
• There is no evidence that Walker was valedictorian, and the reference was eventually removed from his campaign site.

• “Every report and every scandal that emerges about Herschel Walker reinforces that he is not who he says he is, is not ready to represent the people of Georgia, and cannot be trusted to serve Georgians in the U.S. Senate,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia.

• Critics have also questioned claims surrounding his business background.
   
• Months after the AP reported on how Walker’s business records showed “exaggerated claims of financial success” and a history of alarming associates with “unpredictable behavior,” Walker made false claims regarding the earnings and size of his chicken business, Renaissance Man Food Services, according to the Daily Beast.

The Strange Tale of Herschel Walker and the Chicken Empire That Wasn’t

New York Times, 6/14/22

• Walker has made his record as an entrepreneur central to his biographical narrative, describing himself as the “successful owner” of as many as a dozen businesses.

• But Walker’s origin story about his food-services company fits a pattern of exaggerations, half-truths and outright falsehoods that dates back to at least the 1990s.

• A 1996 profile of Walker in Sports Illustrated by the columnist Skip Bayless called his statements “a wacky maze of contradictions” and portrayed Walker as setting himself up to fall short of the “superhuman” expectations he publicly set for himself.
  
• Many aspects of Walker’s biography, however, have collapsed under closer scrutiny. On Monday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Walker has repeatedly claimed he “worked in law enforcement,” when in fact he hasn’t.

• Walker has even lied about graduating from college, which he did not do, then lied about whether he lied about graduating from college, as CNN found he did. He also has layered on further embellishment at times, claiming that he graduated “in the top 1 percent of my graduating class,” which he did not.
  
• On Tuesday, Walker publicly acknowledged having fathered a second son with whom he is not in contact after a report by The Daily Beast, which said it had confirmed the 10-year-old boy’s parentage.

• In an interview with Fox Business in 2018, Walker said that Renaissance Man Food Services was “the largest minority-owned chicken business in the United States,” which was not true.

• He also said it was “essentially a mini Tyson Foods” with “over 600 employees.” Two years later, in an interview with Scott Murray, a sports broadcaster in Dallas, Walker said the company had “about 800 employees.”

• But in April 2020, Renaissance Man Food Services listed just eight employees on a loan application for the Paycheck Protection Program, the coronavirus-era relief program.

• Renaissance Man Food Services did not own the chicken-processing plants Walker has claimed it owned, either. As he told the court in a deposition for a wrongful termination suit that was previously examined by The Associated Press, “I don’t mean to speak of ‘own’ in a technical sense.”

• Asked for the same deposition if he had come up with the name of his company on his own, Walker responded, “Yes, I’m the Renaissance Man.” But when pressed about the name’s origins, he said, “I have no clue where it came from.”

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