Not only does Mikie Sherrill keep changing her story on her tainted Naval Academy graduation, she refuses to let the public see the records that would settle all questions.
New Jersey voters deserve to know the truth before they choose their next governor.
When the scandal first broke late last month, Sherrill admitted she wasn’t allowed to graduate with her class on May 25, 1994 because of her role in a massive cheating scandal — but insisted it was simply because she refused to rat out the classmates who actually cheated.
“I didn’t turn in some of my classmates, so I didn’t walk,” she claimed, noting that she did graduate eventually and then served as an officer for nearly a decade.
But she refused to OK the release of her sealed academy disciplinary records that would confirm — or falsify — her account.
Indeed, her campaign complains that even the fact of her delayed graduation never should’ve been made public — though the simple fact that the day’s program didn’t list her among the graduates was always a matter of public record.
She added to her story at a campaign event: “I knew people who were implicated in” the cheating, but “I didn’t come forward with that information” — which was apparently a violation of the academy’s honor code.
But she shifted her account after last week’s debate with Jack Ciattarelli, the GOP candidate: “There were hundreds of people in my class that spoke to investigators. When I did, I told them what I knew,” she told reporters.
Huh?
So she did rat?
Then why was she disciplined?
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Mikie won’t say, nor let Garden Staters see the records that would explain what actually happened — including why she was kept at the academy for 254 days — nearly nine months — after graduation.
Her campaign claims she was just waiting for a flight-school slot to open up, but other academy grads suggest it sounds more like she was obliged to do an “honor remediation” to graduate despite her role in the cheating affair, whatever that truly was.
Of the 88 students found guilty in that scandal, some two dozen were expelled while dozens more got lesser penalties.
All signs are that Sherrill’s remaining service was fully above-board, which makes it strange that she won’t come clean about just what happened back then — and stranger still that’s she’s started contradicting her own accounts.
You have to think that something ugly is in her records to make keeping them secret seem like her safest choice.