Tim Sheehy, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Montana, a race that could decide control of the chamber, appears to have failed to follow Pentagon rules for clearing portions of his autobiography about his time as a US navy Seal, documents obtained by the Guardian show.
Responding to freedom of information requests, officials with the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR) said that after “thorough searches of the electronic records and files”, they found no record of Sheehy submitting a DD 1910 form, required for all such projects, or any communications at all concerning review and approval of Mudslingers, the book Sheehy published with Permuted Press last year.
“We believe that search methods were appropriate and could reasonably be expected to produce the requested records if they existed,” the DOPSR officials wrote.
Other memoirs of US military service, including service in Afghanistan, where Sheehy served, have generated lawsuits over clearance issues.
As Republicans try to take back the Senate, which Democrats hold 51-49, Montana has emerged as a key battleground. The Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, is seeking a fourth term but the state is otherwise strongly Republican. Polling shows a close race, Sheehy often in the lead.
Tester, 68, is a political moderate. Sheehy, 37 and endorsed by Donald Trump as an “America First patriot”, has attracted a stream of controversies, with subjects including his claims about his Minnesota childhood; his business affairs; his characterizations of his military career and wounds; rightwing thinktank links; misogynistic and racist social media posts; and derogatory remarks about Native Americans. Even his book has attracted controversy, over how its proceeds are divided.
According to its subtitle, Mudslingers is “A True Story of Aerial Firefighting”, the sector in which Sheehy worked and prospered after founding Bridger Aerospace, his Montana-based company.
But the book also describes Sheehy’s time at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; his special forces training; and his career with the Seals, which included tours to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sheehy describes combat zone incidents including the search for Linda Norgrove, a kidnapped British aid worker accidentally killed by a US special forces operative; exposure to drone technology that sparked his interest in the sector; a friendly fire incident in which a Hellfire missile “ripped through my unit when we were mistaken for enemy troops”; a skirmish in which he was shot in the arm; and “various IED exposures [that] produced a couple traumatic brain injuries [and] some shrapnel hitting my right leg and head”.
He also recounts his time with “a small and highly specialized team in Hawaii that … carried out some of the nation’s most important missions”. During that deployment, Sheehy writes, he suffered a bad case of decompression sickness, or “the bends”, while training on a mini-submarine.
On the page, Sheehy says that injury, disillusionment over military personnel policies and an unwelcome desk job offer led him to choose to end his military career – a version of events that does not match his own words on the campaign trail, including telling voters he had been “discharged” owing to wounds sustained on duty.
Sheehy has also faced questions over his changing accounts of how he was shot in the arm, why he did not report it at the time, and what he said to a park ranger about the wound when, in 2015, he was cited for illegally discharging a weapon in a national park.
Mudslinger runs to 325 pages. Sheehy’s time in the military takes up just 25. Nonetheless, Sheehy’s apparent lack of official Pentagon clearance may now add to his list of campaign controversies.
According to DOPSR, a Pentagon body set up in 1949, “a prepublication security and policy review is the process by which information proposed for public release is reviewed to ensure compliance with established national and DoD policies, and to determine that it contains no classified, controlled unclassified, export-controlled, or operational security related information”.
Such reviews are necessary, DOPSR says, “to ensure information damaging to the national security is not inadvertently disclosed”.
Pentagon employees and military service members “have a lifelong responsibility to submit for prepublication review any information intended for public disclosure that is or may be based on protected information gained while associated with the department”.
DOPSR guidelines cover “all current, former, and retired DoD employees, contractors, and military service members (whether active or reserve) who have had access to DoD information, facilities, or who signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)”.
According to DOPSR, the guidelines cover “fictional novels, stories and biographical accounts of operational deployments and wartime experiences”. The copyright page of Mudslingers describes “a work of nonfiction … portrayed to the best of the author’s memory”.
Representatives for Sheehy have rejected previous questions about his characterisation of his military record as politically motivated attacks.
A spokesperson for Sheehy did not respond to a request for comment about his book and the Pentagon review process.
Sheehy is not the first Trumpworld figure to encounter questions about security reviews of a memoir.
In late 2020, John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, defeated attempts to block publication of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened. The Department of Justice launched an investigation and a lawsuit, both of which were dropped once Joe Biden became president.
In May 2022, Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense, was cleared by the Pentagon to release his memoir, A Sacred Oath, “with minimal redactions” arising from pre-publication review, after Esper threatened to sue. The book proved to contain numerous scenes embarrassing to Trump and senior aides.
