A Line-by-Line Indictment of Tester’s Actions

For those of you who caught Monday's "Montana Talks" radio show, you asked if we could post a link to the piece I was referring to that detailed the false allegations used by Democrat Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) to smear Navy Admiral Ronny Jackson.

In this piece written by an Afghan war veteran for The Federalist, James Hasson puts forth a line-by-line indictment of Tester. Click here to read the full column.

The big question, of course, is why? Why did Jon Tester take to national television to smear Admiral Ronny Jackson with what he admitted on MSNBC were unproven allegations?

Here's an excerpt from Hasson's piece:

Senator Tester’s motivation for leading the crusade against Admiral Jackson is not difficult to divine: he is up for reelection in a state that Trump carried by twenty points, Jackson is already a weak nominee (more on that in a minute), and a public fight for better leadership at the VA plays well in a red state. Nuking Jackson’s confirmation on the launch pad by (supposedly) exposing serious misconduct would allow Tester to remind Montana voters that he really cares about veterans, a point he would be sure to hammer all summer and fall. But he appears to have recklessly overplayed his hand. In his haste to reveal Admiral Jackson’s character, Jon Tester revealed his own.

Local CBS stations are now also carrying an op-ed from a CNN contributor headlined "The smearing of Ronny Jackson is a disgrace."

These allegations were so outrageous that Jonathan Swan, the reporter from Axios who broke the original story that Jackson's nomination was in trouble, refused to print them. In an interview with Fox News, Swan expressed a "sense of deep concern and anger" about how Tester and the media circulated the accusation against Jackson "because I broke that stupid story on Sunday... [that] his confirmation is in peril...The reason I wrote it that way is not because I didn't know what the allegations were. I was given them on Friday. I knew what these allegations were. But I don't know if they are true ... So I'm not just going to go, 'Well, it's alleged, and I am hearing that this guy did all of these terrible things, and x, y, and z,' because I have no idea if it's true or not. And clearly neither does Jon Tester. Surely, this is a problem."