The Scandal That Took Down Tim Walz
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How a mixture of real investigations, wild allegations, evidence of actual fraud, and the right-wing echo chamber ended Tim Walz’s governor campaign in Minnesota.
Guest: Deena Winter, Minneapolis City Hall reporter for the Star Tribune.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:32.1 | I've been thinking a lot about what qualifies as an investigation these days. |
| 0:41.6 | I say that because my social feeds are filled with investigations, of all kinds. |
| 0:47.2 | Like there's this one guy I follow who seems exclusively interested in abandoned buildings. |
| 0:53.7 | He takes pictures of empty office parks with |
| 0:56.4 | drained swimming pools and kitchens still filled with food. And then he tells you the story of |
| 1:02.7 | what happened there, or at least what he thinks happened there. Anyway, over the Christmas |
| 1:07.6 | holiday, I got flooded with a different kind of investigation. |
| 1:15.0 | Hello, we'd like to ask where the money's going. |
| 1:18.1 | This is a video from a right-wing YouTuber named Nick Shirley. Maybe you caught it too. |
| 1:24.1 | I don't think anybody is enabling fraud to happen. |
| 1:26.1 | Hold Governor Walls accountable for this. What was this money spent? In it, Shirley goes door to door in Minneapolis, |
... |
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