Asked about a long-ago Saturday night when he arrested a man called Tim Walz for drunken driving, Nebraska State Trooper Stephen Rasgorshek cited an axiom he formulated while making more than 1,000 such busts on the roads of Nebraska.
“One of the things I've always said is, anyone can get a DUI. It’s what you do with it after you get the DUI,” Rasgorshek told The Daily Beast on Monday. “If he had stuck with his story of, ‘Look, it changed my life and I stopped drinking,’ I would commend him, 1,000 percent.”
But what happened that night—and the very different way his campaign tried to spin it when Walz entered the world of politics a decade later—is now worth re-examining as he tries to become vice president.
A transcript of a hearing that followed the Sept. 23, 1995, arrest shows that Walz initially responded just as the trooper would have hoped.
Along with immediately swearing off drink, the 31-year-old teacher and football coach had immediately reported the incident to his principal at Alliance High School, where he was one of the most popular and highly regarded members of the faculty. Walz had offered his resignation.
“Fortunately, the principal talked him out of resigning from school,” his attorney, Russell Harford, told the court. “He did, in fact, though, resign from his extracurricular activities… which included some coaching responsibilities.”
The defense attorney continued, “He takes the position that he's a role model for the students there. He let them down. He let himself down.”
Harford reported that Walz had “taken the opportunity to turn this into a positive for him and his students.”
U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Archives, Criss Library, University of Nebraska at Omaha
“Now he is ministering, so to speak, to the students about all the bad things that can happen to you if you drink and drive and get caught drinking and driving,” the attorney said, adding, “I think there’s some good to come from this.”
Judge James Hansen said he was particularly disturbed to see a teacher before him on this charge, for he is indeed a role model.
“That’s why you’re a teacher,” Hansen told him. “If you didn’t think you could affect children’s lives, why would you be a teacher?”
The judge concluded the March 13, 1996, hearing in Danes County Court with the hope that Walz would give proof to an old saying; “Every adversity has a seed of greater benefit.” Walz could have been sent to jail for driving over 90 mph in a 55 mph zone with a blood alcohol over the legal limit. But he was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving and got off with a $200 fine, plus court costs.
“I certainly hope that you’ve learned from this, and I hope that you can share that with your students, Mr. Walz,” the judge said.
Walz subsequently moved with his wife, Gwen, to her home state of Minnesota, where he continued teaching high school and resumed coaching football. His school’s team won its first state championship shortly after.
Walz also decided to run for Congress as a Democrat in 2006. A Republican blog, perhaps unsurprisingly, dug up the old DUI arrest.
If he had just stuck to the truth, even the trooper who arrested him would have said he was to be commended for his resolve to make it a teacher’s teachable moment.
But this was politics, and his campaign manager Kerry Greely was quoted telling the Rochester Post Bulletin that Walz had not been drunk. She said that ear damage suffered during his continued service with an artillery unit of the Minnesota National Guard had affected his balance and impaired his ability to hear the trooper’s command.
“He couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him,” Greely was quoted saying.
Walz’s spokesperson, Meredith Salsbery, was quoted telling NUJournal much the same thing, further contending: “The trooper refused to speak up.”
Walz had indeed undergone surgery for long-term ear damage in 2005. But that was 10 years after the DUI arrest and Rasgorshek told the Daily Beast that the field sobriety testing took place in the quiet of his radio car on a deserted stretch of Highway 385 miles from Alliance. And Rasgorshek had a particular reputation.
“Everyone, all my friends laugh, because everyone knows, if I do one thing, it’s speak very loudly,” Rasgorshek reported to The Daily Beast. ”My wife and kids and mom are laughing, saying, ‘Steven you’ve never been told to speak up.”
As for troubles with balancing, Rasgorshek said that the tests he conducted included the horizontal gaze nystagmus, in which the subject is asked to follow an object with his eyes. A twitching before the eyes are at 45 degrees is a reliable indication of inebriation. Walz failed it.
“We were told that having a hearing problem had nothing to do with what the eyes are doing,” Rasgorshek noted.
RONDA CHURCHILL/AFP via Getty Images
Walz also failed a breathalyzer. And a hospital test that followed put Walz’s blood alcohol level at .128, which was .028 over the legal limit at the time. And, considering that there was a long wait for a tow truck to haul away Walz’s car before they could head to the hospital, Rasgorshek figures Walz might have actually been at a .170 when he was stopped.
As Rasgorshek sees it, Walz was implicitly admitting that he had been drinking before the arrest when he announced he had stopped drinking because of it.
Walz called the arrest a “gut check moment” and he appears to have remained sober since then, having given up booze for what has been called “unending bottles of Diet Mountain Dew.”
That is famously also the favorite drink of JD Vance, Walz’s GOP counterpart and the running mate of former President Donald Trump.
As compared to those two giants of mendacity, Walz is a paragon of honesty—even if you think he did not simply misspeak when he said he had carried “a weapon of war, in war” despite never actually being in combat.
But a lie is still a lie and that is why a long-ago drunk driving collar is still an issue. Rasgorshek, who is now retired, put forth the truth on Monday in the simplest terms.
“Saw drunk. Arrested same.”
