Maryland's Democrat Gov. Wes Moore's own Army supervisor in Afghanistan says the governor never led troops in combat, calling his years of claims "disingenuous" and, asked whether he thinks Moore is a liar, he said "I do," according to Spotlight on Maryland.
Retired Lt. Col. James "Jamie" Gottschling, then a major and the 82nd Airborne brigade's fire support coordinator, supervised Moore daily at Forward Operating Base Salerno. "His service in Afghanistan was good. He was a valued member of the brigade staff," he said. "It's disingenuous to say that you led paratroopers in combat or that you did what would be direct action activities in a combat zone."
In a post on X May 8, 2022, Moore wrote of "when I was an Army captain and led soldiers into combat in Afghanistan."
Meanwhile, in a March 2021 podcast interview with David Rubenstein, he said, "I went over and led a group of paratroopers as a special operations officer over there." His 2015 book, "The Work," describes bullets striking the ground around him in a firefight. Gottschling says none of it matches the job Moore actually held: Moore worked for him "exclusively on information operations coordination," was never involved in employing any weapons system, and "didn't have any troops assigned to him."
"You don't really lead staff officers. You coordinate with staff officers," Gottschling said. "I like to say that we're combat veterans, but we're not veterans of combat," he said of their brigade headquarters. He said Moore sometimes left the base to meet Afghan officials, but those trips never produced hostile action.
Moore's Combat Action Badge was for a minor indirect rocket attack at FOB Salerno on Dec. 9, 2005 that injured no soldiers, not for a firefight. His military records show him qualified only as a Military Police officer, not infantry, special operations or information operations, though he told the USO's "On Patrol" magazine in 2014 that he "became special ops" with the 82nd. The Army's records put him in country for six months and 27 days, Aug. 15, 2005 to March 14, 2006, while Moore has put the deployment anywhere from 10 to 13 months in various interviews.
Moore, who is airborne qualified, did not train with the brigade beforehand or make training jumps, Gottschling said, and was not in jump status or drawing jump pay. "He's not a paratrooper," he said.
He was just as blunt about the glowing 2006 evaluation Moore received, which called him a "Top 1% officer." Gottschling, who was Moore's rater, said evaluations routinely carried inflated praise to help soldiers advance: "There's a lot of embellishment with that, but that's just how the system was." His objection is to what came after Moore came home, when he "began falsely portraying himself as a paratrooper and combat leader," in Spotlight's words, to build a political career. "It's the embellishment of the actions that really just contribute to his narrative, to his story, to his accolades, and it's self-promotion, it's self-aggrandizement," Gottschling said.
In August 2024, after The New York Times reported that Moore had listed the medal on a White House Fellows application, Moore said, "I take full accountability for an honest mistake that was made on an application that I sent out nearly 20 years ago," as FOX 5 reported. He received a retroactive Bronze Star that December. Spotlight's June 28 report quoted Gottschling saying a photo from the March 1, 2006 awards ceremony at Salerno shows Moore receiving an Army Commendation Medal, not a Bronze Star, and that "they clearly wanted to fix a political problem." Gottschling told Spotlight he was not consulted in the 2024 retroactive process and would not have concurred with it.
The Washington Free Beacon, which has followed the series, reported in May that Spotlight found Moore did not meet the degree and officer-training deadlines attached to his 1998 reserve commission. As we reported when Spotlight's editors said the series was coming, Moore's team had already been attacking the reporting before it ran.