Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald has admitted that he lied about serving in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
‘Special Forces? What years? I was in special forces,’ McDonald said when a homeless man told him he had served among the Army’s elite troops.
The late January comments were caught on camera for a CBS piece about the continued large numbers of homeless veterans.
‘I have no excuse,’ McDonald said when pressed on the matter, according to The Huffington Post.
‘I incorrectly stated that I had been in Special Forces. That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement,’ he said Monday in a statement.
‘I reacted spontaneously and I reacted wrongly, [with] no intent in any way to describe my record any different than it is,’ McDonald, who left the Army in 1980 and eventually became CEO of Procter & Gamble.
‘As I thought about this later I knew this [claim] was wrong,’ he said of his exchange with the unidentified homeless man.
The secretary completed Army Ranger training but never served in the elite force.
He instead became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division after his graduation from West Point.
Army Special Forces, also called the Green Berets, are highly trained units analogous to the Navy SEALs or the Marine Corps’ Raider Regiment.
Instead of answering to the ordinary chain of command, they fall under the Department of Defense’s U.S. Special Operations Command.
The lie does not look likely to affect McDonald’s standing with President Barack Obama.
‘Secretary McDonald has apologized for the misstatement and noted that he never intended to misrepresent his military service,’ the White House said in a statement.
‘We take him at his word and expect that this will not impact the important work he’s doing to promote the health and well-being of our nation’s veterans.’
McDonald replaced former Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki last year, after he resigned amid a scandal over long wait times for veterans at VA hospitals.
Revelations about McDonald’s false service claims follow the suspension of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams for repeatedly telling a false story about being shot at during the war in Iraq.
Williams later said that his helicopter was right behind one that was shot at, which was also not true.
A story published by the left-wing magazine Mother Jones this week also questioned whether Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly has been truthful about his reporting of the Falklands War.
Journalists who were on the ground with O’Reilly at the time have rushed to his defense, however, agreeing with his version of events.
Conservatives on Twitter, who mocked Williams by creating photos of him at the moon landing and other impossible places, voiced their frustration with the news about McDonald.
‘Brian Williams remembers going out on a special forces mission with Robert McDonald,’ Washington, D.C. political fundraiser Nathan Wurtzel said.
Special forces members generally become upset when soldiers who did not serve in one of the four designated special operations forces claims they did.
Retired Army Col. Gary Bloomberg called McDonald’s remarks ‘a boneheaded statement’ but said service members’ anger would not be as strong as in other cases where soldiers wear medals they did not earn.
McDonald’s only issue is that he got caught on camera doing this. When he was CEO of Procter and Gamble, that company was quick to crawl into bed with a Marxist Obama. You are known by the company you keep and Obama would not have tapped him for the job if he wasn’t corrupt and easily swayed. I take umbrage with what McDonald did – you are commiserating with homeless vets who have nowhere to go, acting like you have the foggiest idea of what they are going through. You don’t. Like so many other elitists that orbit Obama, you don’t remember what it is like to be a regular human being and lying has become second nature to you. Shame on you for dishonoring those vets who need you the most. Disgraceful.