Less than twenty-four hours after Kamala Harris introduced him as the future, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s past has come back to haunt him.
It has arrived in the form of a resurgent mugshot: grainy black-and-white evidence of a crime and a moment he would rather forget.
The image, obtained by DailyMail.com, shows a glassy-eyed Walz moments after he was arrested on September 30, 1995, and booked into the Dawes County Jail in Nebraska on charges of speeding and drunk driving.
The Minnesota governor was a 31-year-old school teacher and football coach in Alliance, Nebraska, when he was chased by a state patrol officer and charged with driving at a staggering speed of 96 mph in a 55 mph zone. He was also serving in the Army National Guard.
Tim Walz is seen, glassy-eyed, posing for his mugshot moments after his arrest for drunk driving in Nebraska in September 1995.
Walz’s brush with the law resurfaced just hours after Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced him as her running mate on Tuesday.
He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of reckless driving when his attorney raised an extraordinary defense that he argued would cause his breathalyzer results to be suppressed if the case went to trial.
Despite the police report stating, “A strong odor of alcoholic beverage was detected on Mr. Walz’s breath and person,” and the fact that he failed field sobriety tests, a breath test and a blood test, his attorney said the DUI charge should be dropped.
Walz was taken to Chadron Hospital for blood tests and was booked into the Dawes County Jail.
According to a court transcript, Walz had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.128.
Court transcripts reviewed by DailyMail.com show that Walz’s attorney, Russell Harford, claimed his client’s speeding was not due to drunkenness but to the fact that Walz had a hearing impairment that led him to believe the officer trying to stop him was chasing him.
He explained: ‘I think initially one of the state patrol officers timed it at about 70.
‘The officer didn’t turn on his red lights and someone was coming up behind him very fast and he didn’t know what they were doing so he sped up to try and get away, fearing someone was chasing him.
“And lo and behold, behind him was a state trooper, so the faster he went, the faster the state trooper went. Finally, he turned on his red lights.
His lawyer said hearing loss played a role in his 1995 arrest for drunk driving.
A police report of the incident says Walz failed a field sobriety test and a preliminary breath test before being taken to Chadron Hospital for a blood test on Sept. 23, 1995.
At the time of his arrest, Walz was teaching and living in Nebraska with his new wife Gwen, with whom he is still married and has two children. He was also serving in the Army National Guard.
‘The speed was quite excessive, Your Honor, way over the speed limit. I don’t even know what was alleged in the complaint. It might have been ninety-something.’
Harford offered no explanation for why the teacher and football coach might have believed someone was “out to get him,” but noted that the court had suppressed test results in previous cases where hearing impairment played a role.
He went on to tell the court that Walz felt “terrible” about the whole affair and had immediately offered to resign from his position at Alliance High School, an offer the principal “convinced him not to accept.”
She added: “I think Mr Walz has taken the opportunity to turn this into a positive thing for himself and his students by explaining to them, so to speak, all the bad things that can happen to you if you drink and drive and get caught drinking and driving.”
By the time his case reached court, Walz had already administratively lost his license for 90 days and, his attorney said, “went through every hoop to get it reinstated.”
In the end, he was fined $200 and paid court costs.
Harris’s group believes Walz will be able to reach rural voters in the Midwest.
These days, Harris’ running mate drinks nothing stronger than Mountain Dew, of which he is a huge fan, having given up alcohol following his run-in with the law 19 years ago.
The incident first resurfaced during Walz’s 2006 congressional campaign, when a spokesman claimed that Walz, 60, simply “couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him.”
Kerry Greeley, Walz’s campaign manager at the time, told a Rochester Post reporter that it was Walz’s deafness, which he suffered from his time serving in a National Guard artillery unit, that led to a miscommunication between Walz and the officer who stopped him.
There is no mention in the officer’s report that Walz had a hearing impairment and it is only indirectly referenced in the court proceedings that followed, but according to the New York Times, he underwent corrective surgery in 2005.
But in 2018, during his first campaign for governor, Walz acknowledged the issue of sobriety, saying he had been watching college football with some friends and revealed that his wife Gwen had told him: “You have obligations. You can’t make dumb decisions.”
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