In a Tennessee Republican primary where every candidate is leaning on their military credentials, one state representative hopeful built his brand around his Marine Corps service. Running in Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s district, Brian Stewart’s campaign website, mailers, and social media emphasize his time in uniform as proof of discipline and loyalty, and a campaign promise to “be a watchdog for military families.”
Marine Corps records and interviews with military experts tell a different story. Stewart’s service ended before he completed his reserve service obligation because of “failure to participate.” He left the Marines as a private following a possible demotion. He is ineligible to reenlist, and the Marine Corps has stated that “the character of his service was incongruent with Marine Corps standards.”
Stewart is running for state representative in Tennessee’s District 45, which covers Sumner County, just north of Nashville. Stewart’s campaign identifies him as a conservative businessman, Marine, and community leader.
“It would be the equivalent of saying that you were a college graduate when you in fact had flunked out after your freshman year,” Mark Cancian, a retired colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves and Senior Adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “It is misleading, even though you had attended college.”
Military records, obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner, show that Stewart enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves in October 1998 and left in August 2000, serving for less than 36 months. The report lists his character of service as “under other than honorable conditions.”
“That’s the lowest discharge you can get, short of being court-martialed,” Cancian explained. “You have to really have had unsatisfactory service to get a discharge at that low level.”
The Marine Corps issued a statement to the Washington Examiner about the nature of the candidate’s discharge: “Stewart’s premature discharge and rank at separation indicate that the character of his service was incongruent with Marine Corps standards. Due to privacy and administrative regulations, further details are not releasable.”
Military files on Stewart show that the candidate was asked to leave the Corps due to “failure to participate.” Cancian explained that Stewart was in a reserve unit. He went to boot camp, infantry school, and then got to go back to his hometown and drill with his reserve unit. Training typically occurs one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer.
“He apparently didn’t show up for drills,” Cancian said. “He was supposed to be there for training, didn’t show up, and eventually they tossed him out.”
Marine personnel confirm that Stewart completed his initial training, was never deployed, and separated at the rank of E‑1 (Private), the lowest enlisted rank in the Marine Corps.
“The fact that he remained at E-1 meant that either he was not promoted, which means that someone decided that he was not ready for increased responsibilities,” Cancian said. “Or he was promoted and was then demoted for some behavior or disciplinary reason.”
Discharge papers show Stewart is not eligible to reenlist in the Corps. A letter sent to the Washington Examiner indicates “no active duty was performed other than for training purposes,” making Stewart ineligible for classification as a qualified veteran under the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit program. Stewart posted a picture of himself — on his personal and campaign Facebook page — to celebrate Veterans’ Day and received many comments thanking him for his service.
“There’s no question saying ‘U.S. Marine’ implies honorable service, and of course, he did not have honorable service,” Cancian said. “This is an instance of stolen valor because he is claiming a level of service to the nation that he did not in fact perform.”
Bob Davis, who is helping Brian Stewart with his campaign, was asked by the Washington Examiner if the candidate had any response to the Marines’ statement on his service.
“His folks and his family have served in the military,” Davis said. “He had an irregular heartbeat, he had a thyroid that he had, you know, part of his thyroid taken out. So, it cut his service short. But man loves his country, he loves his community, loves his family, no question about that.”
When asked how a medical issue would explain the Marine Corps’ statement, Davis instead suggested the other candidates in the primary should be looked into.
“That’s just your response,” Davis said. “You know, that’s my response right there.”
Cancian did not believe Davis’s response was a reasonable explanation of the discharge.
“There’s nothing in the documentation about health problems, and if he had health problems, that would be perfectly fine,” Cancian said. “They would have either given him a medical discharge… or they would excuse him from training for a while until he got his health back together. I can say with some assurance that if it were a health problem, he would not have this kind of bad paper.”
The Washington Examiner also pulled the service records of the two other candidates in the races, Chris Hughes and John Gentry, and asked Cancian to compare them with Stewart’s records.
“Stewart was thrown out of the Marine Corps for not coming to training and possibly other problems as well,” Cancian said. “The other two candidates, I’m looking at Hughes here. He was an Army captain, service honorable in the late 1990s. The other candidate, this is Gentry, served in the Marine Corps. He rose to E5 — that’s a sergeant — at the end of eight years, and that’s what you would expect. And sergeant is a fairly responsible position, and he was also in a force recon company, which is a Marine Corps element of Special Forces.”
On the campaign trail, Stewart describes himself broadly as a Marine veteran, a label that carries significant weight with Republican primary voters, especially in Hegseth’s district, and has also gotten him the endorsement of the AFC Victory Fund and Americans for Prosperity. Many of the mailers AFP sent out lean heavily on Stewart’s Marine service. One AFP mailer even calls Stewart a father, though Stewart has no children.
“Obviously, this wasn’t put out by the Brian Stewart campaign,” Davis said. “So, you’d have to ask AFP whatever their response is. We try to keep our stuff pretty accurate.”
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Tori Venable, AFP State PAC Senior Advisor, said in a statement to Washington Examiner: “We are aware of the printing mistake and corrections have already been made. This doesn’t change the fact that AFP State PAC supports Brian Stewart, because he is a no-nonsense, Conservative leader that is needed in the Tennessee General Assembly.”
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Hegseth for comment and has yet to hear back.