Barry Moore wants to sue me.
Well, to be more accurate, his campaign is threatening to sue APR over questions I asked his campaign. Questions about Moore’s service record.
In a three-page letter received Thursday evening, attorney Nadin Linthorst, from a D.C. law firm, demanded that APR “cease and desist” from publishing any story about Moore’s military service record that might suggest Moore “falsely claimed, fabricated, exaggerated, embellished, or misrepresented his military service.”
To be absolutely crystal clear, I had not planned to write a story implying or stating that Moore “falsely claimed, fabricated, exaggerated, embellished, or misrepresented his military service.”
Other people have made those claims. Or slyly implied such things. But I didn’t.
I did what reporters are supposed to do when they receive allegations from an anonymous source—allegations that several other media outlets have received; allegations that one media outlet had already printed; allegations that the Moore campaign had already received calls about; allegations that had been brought up to Moore during a campaign stop and addressed by his opponent earlier in the day—I sent specific questions about the allegations to Moore’s campaign so his people could address those allegations. Then I got on the phone with a staff member to go over things in more detail. Then I sent more questions at the staffer’s direction.
I was waiting on the reply to those questions when the letter from Linthorst showed up.
I’ll give Linthorst credit, I’ve received my fair share of threatening lawyer letters over the years and this one was particularly dark and ominous. It stopped just short of promising to take my daughter’s college fund if I wrote a cross word about Barry Moore.
But that was also its problem.
It was too much. Too over the top. Too absurdly threatening.
It’s the sort of thing you send someone if you know you don’t have the facts on your side and you’re trying to scare them into not playing their hand. Not facts about Moore’s service record—because I really don’t know if he’s embellished that and never really believed he did—but facts about stopping a news publication from publishing a story about a bona fide issue of public interest.
Oh, sure, Moore could sue—you can sue anyone for anything at anytime—but any attorney with a degree could tell you that the likelihood of success is virtually nil. No matter how much you bluster and protest on the front side.
News is news, and it doesn’t really matter if telling that news doesn’t work out so swell for you.
Like in this case, I know what Moore’s campaign is trying to do. They don’t want the story to be printed at all because any telling of it raises the possibility of doubt about Moore’s service record. It doesn’t matter how fairly I present it or how factual it is.
Barry Moore knows this better than anyone, because back in 2024, he signed onto a letter that raised questions about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s service record. Walz was the Democratic vice president nominee, and Republicans were doing pretty much everything to dirty him up. One tactic was to nitpick his 24-year service career in the military by questioning his claimed rank in retirement.
There wasn’t much to the allegations—how can you seriously question the 24-year service of a man when his opponent was a draft-dodging, bone spur-claiming chicken hawk with five deferments—but that didn’t matter. The mere mention of the allegations was enough to sling a bit of dirt. And Moore was happy to lend his name to the effort, signing onto a letter written by Florida Representative Brian Mast to Walz calling the governor’s claim of “retired sergeant major,” when Walz had actually achieved that level but retired a step down from it, an “insult” to service members and “not honorable.”
There was Barry Moore’s name on that letter, along with the rank of “staff sergeant.”
Small problem: Moore was not a staff sergeant when he retired.
Moore served about 31 months in the Alabama National Guard in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He then severed that contract to take a civilian job and agreed to serve out the remainder of his six-year contract in the Individual Ready Reserve, IRR. The IRR is a group of military trained citizens who are not active and do not participate in monthly training or receive pay, but they can be recalled quickly in the event of a national emergency or war. And that service counts toward the completion of the contract.
Linthorst also claimed in his lengthy letter that Moore was called into active duty at one point in 1989, for about two months. Moore, like Walz, did temporarily, it appears from documents I reviewed, attain the rank of staff sergeant, as he went through a training course that he didn’t complete prior to leaving the National Guard, but he did not hold that rank in retirement.
The campaign could not account for this staff sergeant claim. They initially denied that Moore made such a claim. When I forwarded the letter with his name and “Staff Sergeant—Army National Guard (Ret.)” on it, they couldn’t explain it.
So, they threatened to sue.
That wasn’t the only problem, either.
The material that has been making the rounds —the stuff being cited on various websites and talked about amongst Republican talking heads—claims that Moore’s service record does not technically qualify him to be called a “veteran.” (Personally, I think that’s nonsense. You sign up, you go through the training, you put up with the yelling and running and possibility of war service, and you come out of there with an honorable discharge, you get to be called a veteran.)
There’s really no sense getting into the specifics of why Moore is or isn’t a veteran, because unless you’re part of the military life (and I’m not), you likely wouldn’t understand them or appreciate them. But what does matter is that Moore was asked a couple of days ago at a campaign stop if he is a veteran. And in a room full of people, he provided one of the most awkward, rambling, nonsensical answers I’ve ever heard.
This is it verbatim: “I served six years in the Guard, my brother’s a retired Marine … my son-in-law was an Army Ranger and I grew up with Fort Rucker right there in my district. So, all of my buddies’ dads—most of them, not all of them—but a lot of them were Vietnam-era pilots. The Chevrolet dealership in Enterprise, Alabama, I was told, sold more Corvettes during the Vietnam War than any other dealership in the country, because you had all of these young warrant officers, these young commission guys—before they’d ship out, they’d go buy them a Chevrolet. So, most of my friends’ dads, or a lot of them, were old Vietnam guys. Warrant officers, young lieutenants, you know. They retired and so, I got to know a lot of those men and appreciated the job they’ve done serving our country.”
Not exactly Shakespeare.
And nowhere in there did he say he was a veteran.
Now, maybe that’s just because he got caught up rambling on and forgot what he was even asked. Or maybe he was just caught off guard. Or maybe he was hesitant for some unknown reason.
But that added more fuel to the fire.
That also was one of my questions to the campaign—does Moore consider himself a veteran?
Seems like a bit of a softball question, given that Moore has the word “veteran” in every ad. He called himself the only military veteran running during his 2020 campaign.
The answer I got back was the lawsuit threat.
In the threatening letter, though, Linthorst makes it absolutely clear that he thinks Moore is a veteran and he offers some defense of that position. They are strong, solid arguments. The campaign provided APR with a video showing Moore logging into his VA account and accessing his records.
So, there are answers to most of the questions I posed—answers that might clear up some of the chatter about Moore’s service record.
It’s a shame they threatened to sue instead of just providing those answers.
