The Real Tim Sheehy
by Roger Koopman
This is an extract from Roger Koopman’s longer post shown here.
Sheehy is the hand-picked golden boy of the state GOP’s Daines-Zinke moderate wing.
Himself a Montana transplant, Sheehy is a decorated Navy Seal and super-rich federal contractor. The perfectly engineered candidate to challenge Jon Tester – or so the Washington D.C. GOP Establishment believes.
Sheehy’s history paints a shocking and frightening picture of a man who is not only devoid of conservative activism, but who has embraced radical leftist causes and gobbled up corporate welfare on his way to great wealth at taxpayer expense.
Examples of the real Tim Sheehy:
1. His Bridger Aerospace company promoted itself to the far-left Woke community as a “fundamentally-driven ESG business,” thus securing a $160 million ESG industrial development bond – one of the largest ESG-accredited “sustainability” bonds ever.
After becoming a candidate, Sheehy then scrubbed all ESG references from his website. Yet even now, Sheehy continues to be heavily invested in certain climate alarmism-based enterprises, such as the sustainability service Cloverly, a firm that helps companies monitor their “planet-threatening” carbon (CO2) output.
2. Until Sheehy announced for the senate, his company also boldly represented itself as “fighting on the front lines of climate change” and as attacking “CO2 emissions to combat climate change.” This, too, has disappeared from his Bridger website.
As late as August of 2022, Sheehy was still urging “international cooperation” in fighting climate change and described Bridger’s “fundamental business principles of environmental and social sustainability” and the ability “to effectively combat today’s changing climate.”
Now candidate Sheehy is saying on Fox News that “the cleanest form of energy known to man is American fossil fuels.”
3. While earning $5 million a year in salary and bonuses from a company, 96% of whose revenues are derived from government contracts, Sheehy aggressively fattened his bank account further through direct taxpayer subsidies. Most recently, this included a $774,300 payroll “forgivable federal loan” (swamp-speak for subsidy.)
By sheer “coincidence,” he then turned around and personally donated $700,000 to his senate campaign. Sheehy then feasted at the corporate welfare trough a second time, taking a $221,000 federal SBA subsidy so taxpayers could have the privilege of underwriting the training of his employees.
Imagine a man with a probable net worth of over $200 million, having a clear conscience while plundering the average taxpayer with socialistic schemes that his own business should be paying for.
The net effect: tax dollars diverted to enhance his bottom line.
4. In his TV spots, Sheehy strikes quite the pose, donning his cowboy hat while prominently planted in the saddle of a sturdy quarter horse.
Indeed, with his political donations, Sheehy likes to describe himself as “rancher” or “cowboy.” Yet no serious rancher would have somehow “forgotten” to register his livestock with the Department of Revenue as state law requires. Still, after four years of ownership, Sheehy has yet to report as much as one skinny chicken. His estimated unpaid tax bill in now is the tens of thousands.
One can only guess how much is yet to be uncovered about his self-aggrandizing business practices. Critics have already latched on to his Montana state tax avoidance by incorporating on the east coast, and his recent merger with Jack Creek Investment, a “blank check” corporation operating out of the Cayman Islands, a tax haven for the wealthy.
For a candidate who would likely enter the Senate as the wealthiest member of Congress, there is something distinctly selfish and unseemly about his entrepreneurial philosophy – something that is likely to stick in the craw of the average Montana voter.
Add to this, the lingering questions about the sources of his sudden post-military largesse and the lewd photos and erotica connected to his early years on Facebook.
Then too, Bridger Aerospace’s Diversity and Inclusion statement in its 2023 FSC filing is not likely to warm the cockles of conservatives’ hearts.
Sheehy is the perfect Play-Doh in the hands of the big business, country club establishment – faux Republicans who value money, prestige, and power over courage, conviction and principle.
Those who still think Sheehy would be the “more effective” candidate to defeat the far-left Tester had better think twice. The Democrats will have a field day exposing his private breaches of the public trust.
Combined with this are the many reports of Sheehy’s below-the-belt campaign tactics, said to be among the most reprehensible in recent Montana memory.