- Montana GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy's old Facebook profile is full of questionable photos.
- They include lewd photos of women, a caricature of Middle Eastern people, and homoerotic jokes.
When Tim Sheehy launched his campaign for US Senate in Montana late last month, national Republicans rejoiced. They'd recruited a star candidate to run against Sen. Jon Tester, one of the most vulnerable incumbent Democrats up for re-election next year.
A former Navy SEAL and wealthy businessman, Sheehy brings the resume and lack of obvious political baggage that national Republicans hope will help them flip the Senate in 2024. Not even two weeks into his campaign, he already has the endorsement of 10 Republican senators, who've backed his campaign in an effort to head off a potential primary challenge from Rep. Matt Rosendale, who lost to Tester in 2018.
But as national Republicans worked to recruit and vet the 38-year-old first-time candidate, they appear to have overlooked a crucial truth of the digital age, and the millennial candidates who have come of age within it — nothing ever quite disappears from the internet.
That's certainly the case with what appears to be Sheehy's Facebook page.
Though aspects of Sheehy's apparent profile — named "Timothy Patrick" — appear to have been made private, Facebook users can still find a litany of photos from his profile dating from 2006 to 2008, when Sheehy was a student at the US Army Ranger School in Georgia and at the US Naval Academy in Maryland.
And the photos include much of what one might expect from an adolescent posting on a burgeoning social media network in the 2000s.
'She's not a skank'
In one photo from 2008, which depicted a muscular woman clad in an American flag bikini and pointing a gun, Sheehy tagged a profile that appears to be that of his now-wife Carmen Sheehy, who he first met when they were students at the Naval Academy.
"WOW! Carmen...when did you go blonde?" wrote one friend, prompting Carmen to sarcastically reply that it was "around the same time I became a steroid using skank."
"Shes not a skank!!! jeeez," Tim Sheehy commented in response. "Shes a very fit defender of Americas freedom obviously."
One week earlier, Sheehy posted a photo of a woman posing on exercise equipment with one nipple exposed.
"I tagged it as carmen and she untagged it...bullshit," Sheehy wrote beneath the post.
Another photo from November 2006 shows a man dressed in a robe and a red checkered keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by men in the Middle East, alongside two men who appear to be dressed as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.
"Well, there will only be 2 members in this picture soon...the guy in the middle is gonna be a dead fucker here soon," wrote one friend. "Hahahhaah, BYE SADDAM, YOU F'ing POONJAB...KIM, U'RE NEXT!"
Hussein was executed by hanging roughly two months later.
In his campaign launch video, Sheehy notes that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 motivated him to enter the military, where he later served in Afghanistan alongside his wife, Carmen — though Sheehy does not appear to be in the photo himself.
Other photos appear to show Sheehy partying with friends while a student at the Naval Academy. In one photo uploaded by Sheehy, a man appears to be drinking from a bottle nestled between a woman's breasts.
"That's not a very good picture of me, I'm short and blonde and my weiner appears to be about half-size," wrote the friend who Sheehy tagged in the photo.
"Well hey, at least you don't look like Sam here [sic]," Sheehy wrote, possibly referring to the woman in the photo. "Although I don't think her boobs are that big..."
And other photos from 2006, dating to when Sheehy was still a student at the US Army Ranger School in Fort Benning, Georgia, show Sheehy engaging in homoerotic rough-housing with other students.
"'Don't ask, don't tell' is still the official policy, right?" wrote one commenter, referring to the since-repealed policy that prevented gay and lesbian service members from coming out while serving.
Reached for comment, Sheehy spokeswoman Katie Martin accused Democrats of resurfacing the "photos of teenagers goofing around," saying it was "rich" for them to do so when Tester had reportedly exposed his genitalia to reporter Ben Terris by urinating in a field in front of him. Terris recounted the tale, which happened years ago when he was writing a profile of Tester, in his newly-released book, The Big Break.
"Neither he nor his staff have yet to explain why a grown man at 66 years old would find that behavior appropriate," said Martin. "So, spare us your hypocrisy and harassment of a war hero over some goofing around as a kid."