Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy struggled in a new interview to give a clear explanation of the circumstances surrounding a 2015 national park incident that led to him being treated for a gunshot wound and receiving a fine. .

In it interview with radio host and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, which was posted online Thursday, Sheehy left Kelly confused and warned that voters in Montana were unclear about what happened. “I just want to give you the opportunity to explain yourself because this is your closing message. It’s about this incident of… voters are confused. … It’s so confusing,” she told him.

Controversy looms over a crucial Senate race in Montana that both parties see as critical to capturing the majority in the final days of a closely contested election.

The questions arise from different accounts Sheehy has given about a bullet lodged in his right arm.

All accounts agree that, as first reported According to the Washington Post this spring, Sheehy went to the hospital after his gun went off in Glacier National Park in 2015 (shooting a gun is illegal in a national park).

Sheehy was approached by a park ranger that day who was responding to a call of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the ranger wrote in a citation at the time and has since I said it publicly. The ranger said Sheehy told him he had accidentally shot himself in the arm and that Sheehy then went to the hospital for treatment.

Sheehy now says he was never hit by gunfire that day in 2015. Instead, he says he was injured during a fall during the hike and sought treatment for a bullet he had already received in the arm, which he received in Afghanistan while serving as a Navy SEAL, a story he told during the election campaign.

Sheehy said he sought treatment the day of the hike in Glacier National Park because he was concerned that the bullet, which was still in his arm, had become dislodged. Crucially, he said he did not report being wounded during combat, either during his service or after his injury at Glacier, because it was the result of a friendly fire incident and he did not want his unit to endure a lengthy investigation for what amounted to a small wound. , a statement he repeated in the interview with Kelly.

He was fined $525 for the gun discharge in Glacier National Park and paid it, he told the Post in April, to avoid an investigation into his unit.

Kelly this week pressed Sheehy about any medical records that might help confirm his account of what happened; Sheehy responded that such records do not exist.

“There isn’t… I mean, that’s the point,” Sheehy said. “You go, you check it and you leave. “There is no extensive medical history for any of this.”

Kelly responded: “It’s very confusing.”

Kelly directly asked Sheehy about the injury at the park: “To be clear, did you shoot yourself in the arm?”

“No, that was never the allegation that… the point is, you know, it was friendly fire that bounced off a range that was not reported at the time,” Sheehy said.

Democrats, fighting to help Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., win a fourth term against long odds in deep red Montana, have accused Sheehy of not being honest about any of the incidents and have asked him release medical and military records. to confirm his story. They have also said that he must have lied about his injury, either to his military command during his service or to park rangers and local authorities in the wake of the incident in Glacier National Park.

In the conversation with Kelly, which is one of the few media interviews Sheehy has given as a candidate, Kelly asked the candidate if he was injured during his walk in the park.

“Yes, I fell and hurt my arm while we were hiking,” he said. “That’s why I went because I could feel the bullet coming off when it fell and it landed on the arm, you could feel the bullet coming off. And then I went to the ER to say, hey, look, you know, I’ve got internal bleeding here. I hurt my arm. Can you take a look at this? Make sure nothing serious is going on here.”

A spokesperson for Sheehy framed questions about the gunshot wound as “an attempt to tear down the record of a combat veteran.”

“The bullet in Tim’s arm was a result of his service in Afghanistan,” Sheehy’s spokesperson said, “Tim never reported it because he didn’t want to start an investigation of his team, be taken off the battlefield and see a fellow soldier. “It was always about protecting a teammate in his unit who he thought might have been responsible due to the ricochet of friendly fire in the heat of an engagement with the enemy.”

Republicans see Sheehy’s race as one of their biggest turnaround opportunities in a cycle in which the map of contested Senate seats favors their party. The Republican challenger has led Tester in most public polls, although Democrats insist the race is not over. Former President Donald Trump is expected to win the state easily.

During the interview with Kelly, Sheehy said the gunshot wound was the result of “friendly fire that bounced off the range” and described the complexity of fighting combat in Afghanistan with “Afghan forces embedded with us.”

“We called those green-on-blue incidents that were actually very common, where you had Afghans who, intentionally or not, ended up shooting at friendly forces,” he said.

Sheehy had originally said that the friendly fire incident was caused by a fellow SEAL, and wrote in his 2023 book ‘Mudslingers’ that he did not report the shooting in Afghanistan “because I didn’t want to be sent home and lose my team, and me “I didn’t want the teammate who had fired that shot, a total stud who had a successful career as a SEAL, to be punished – officially or in reputation – for an accident that was in no way his fault.”

He wrote in the same book that he was discharged from the army for medical reasons, but as NBC News reported last monthThe discharge documents indicate that he resigned voluntarily and do not list any medical conditions that forced him to resign.