Helena, MT – If it’s a day that ends in “y,” Shady Tim Sheehy is telling another lie. Ahead of tonight’s U.S. Senate debate, new reporting from The Guardianrevealed that Tim Sheehy falsely claimed he lived “below the poverty line.”

Sheehy claimed that he lived “below the poverty line” when he founded his company in 2014. In actuality, Sheehy and his wife had “$400,000 to build a company.” The poverty line for a Montana family of three in 2014 was $19,790 – Sheehy had “20 times” that amount.

Sheehy previously claimed he “bootstrapped” his company and lived in a tent when he first moved to Montana, despite receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from his family to start his company. 

Read more below for the latest in Sheehy’s “stream of controversies.” 

The Guardian:  Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale
September 30, 2024
By Martin Pengelly

- At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.

- “My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”

- A little more than a month from election day, in a race that could decide control of the Senate, such hardscrabble tales are helping Sheehy lead the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, a longtime Montana farmer. The two men are due to debate in Missoula on Monday night.

- But Sheehy’s claim about living in poverty while building his company, Bridger Aerospace, is contradicted by his own memoir.

- In that book, Mudslingers, published last year, the former navy Seal writes that when he and his wife contemplated leaving the military, in 2013, they “weren’t wealthy, but … did have resources”.

- “So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”

- In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.

- By his own account, Sheehy set out to build Bridger Aerospace with 20 times that – a sum he calls “not exactly chump change”.

- Sheehy has also regularly claimed to have “bootstrapped” his company, a term the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance”.

- Yet in his book, Sheehy describes both receiving the $100,000 his parents had saved for him and asking his father and brother to help him pay $500,000 to buy necessary planes. His father, he writes, “backed me, financially and emotionally, without expecting anything in return”, while his brother was given an “equity stake in the business”.

- Sheehy also describes how in 2017 his brother helped secure investment from Blackstone Group, the New York private equity behemoth led by Stephen Schwartzman, a top Republican donor, in order to pull off a $200m aircraft order.

- Having purchased “60 undeveloped acres”, Sheehy writes in his book, “the simple and probably sane thing to do would have been to rent an apartment in town while we got the business off the ground”. But they chose to build a house, and to camp while the structure went up.

- Sheehy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.News of Sheehy’s book contradicting his own claim about living in poverty, however, follows similar reporting regarding his claims about his background.

- The Montana Free Press was among outlets to report that though Sheehy has said he grew up in “rural Minnesota … surrounded by farmland”, he in fact “grew up in a multimillion-dollar lake house, learned to fly under the tutelage of a neighbour, [and] attended a private high school”.

- In May, the Daily Beast reported that Sheehy’s campaign trail claims about how he left the US military do not match those in his book. Sheehy’s campaign responded angrily, claiming an attack on his patriotism and service. Then, this month, the Guardian reporteddocuments seemingly showing Sheehy did not follow Department of Defense protocol for clearing sections of Mudslingers that deal with military subjects, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign did not respond.