(Daily Caller News Foundation) — Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire said Saturday night Vice President Kamala Harris “rushed” the selection of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate due to President Joe Biden withdrawing from the presidential race under pressure.
Harris tapped Walz to be her vice president over Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania Aug. 6, a little over two weeks after Biden announced he would not seek reelection July 21, following mounting calls from within his party to step aside after his disastrous performance during a June 27 debate. Sununu said that Democrats “stole the nomination” for Harris by forcing Biden to drop out.
“Gov. Tim Walz supposed to be the plain-speaking Midwesterner, he was gonna bring some accuracy and hometown flavor to the ticket. Well, it turns out he’s got a problem with accuracy,” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said. “Here’s the headline: ‘Walz says he speaks like everybody else, and it’s not working for the campaign,’ because of the Tiananmen Square, saying he was there and he wasn’t, because saying he carried a weapon of war and he didn’t, because he got an award in Nebraska and the people that said gave him an award never gave him an award, and, of course, he misstated his rank. That is a huge problem. Didn’t anyone really vet him?”
“Apparently not. Look, they obviously rushed through this thing. That’s what happens when you try to just steal the nomination away from a sitting president,” Sununu responded.
Walz came under fire after claiming he was in Hong Kong during the June 1989 massacre or protesters in Tiananmen Square during the Oct. 1 vice-presidential debate with Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. Questions about Walz’s retirement from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 arose after a 2018 Facebook post by retired Army Command Sergeant Major Thomas Behrends resurfaced, while Vance accused Walz of “stolen valor” at an Aug. 7 campaign event, citing comments Walz made in a video posted on X by the Harris-Walz campaign.
Sununu also noted that Biden was hurting Harris with comments he made recently claiming that Harris “was a major player” and that she and her staff were “interlocked” with him regarding policy.
“Let’s now add to the next 30 days something that President Biden himself said, that all through this process, he and Kamala Harris’s team have been in lockstep on policy,” Sununu said. “So as much as she is trying to diverge away from the president that she stole the nomination from, he himself is saying, ‘No, no, we’re in absolute lockstep on this stuff.’ She owns the border. She owns the failures of this country right now. She owns inflation. She owns the lack of support of police. And she can’t run away, because even her best friend Joe Biden says so.”
This article was originally published at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
