FOX 45: Analysis: Wes Moore’s Bronze Star was a political rescue mission
Most veterans who were wrongly denied a military award do not get a three-star general to personally intervene for them.
They do not get direct access to the Secretary of the Army.
They do not get a U.S. senator from a state they don’t live in to sponsor the award.
They do not get a politically damaging controversy transformed into a retroactive military honor, almost without question, nearly 20 years later.
And they do not get it done from start to finish in seven days.
But Maryland Gov. Wes Moore did.
Spotlight on Maryland has learned that Moore’s pursuit of the Bronze Star medal in 2024 relied heavily on political favors, special access, inaccurate information about his Afghanistan deployment and involved the deliberate concealment of key facts regarding Moore’s end-of-deployment awards in 2006.
These revelations raise serious questions about the process used to obtain the Bronze Star presented to Moore in 2024 and whether it violated federal law.
An ‘honest mistake’
Moore’s false claim of having a Bronze Star was first reported by FOX45’s Mikenzie Frost in 2022.
The New York Times followed in 2024, revealing that Moore had claimed on a 2006 White House Fellowship application that he had been awarded the Bronze Star, even though Army records showed he had not.
Moore said a superior officer told him the medal had been approved and that it was appropriate to include it on his résumé. He has characterized that decision as an “honest mistake.”
That officer, retired Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, was not merely a superior. He was Moore’s close friend, groomsman, officer who arranged his deployment to Afghanistan, and the man who told The Times he had personally seen Moore’s fully approved Bronze Star paperwork before it was “lost.”
The Times accepted that explanation at face value, allowing it to stand without a meaningful challenge, while also giving Moore and Fenzel the chance to explain away the controversy.
Fixing the ‘Bronze Star problem’
The Times exposé was damaging to Moore, who likely understood he needed to correct his dishonest claim that he had received a Bronze Star in Afghanistan. The day before it was published, on Aug. 28, 2024, Moore and Fenzel discussed the problem in text messages obtained by Spotlight through a Maryland Public Information Act request.
Fenzel, who was still actively serving, had a significant role in pursuing the retroactive award. “As the recommender and given I am still on active duty, I can resubmit both CAB [Combat Action Badge] and Bronze Star with witness statements,” he texted Moore.
Moore replied, “Outstanding!” He told Fenzel the CAB had already been addressed and that only the Bronze Star needed fixing. “That is absolutely huge! Thank you sir!” Moore wrote.
Fenzel later told the Associated Press that his next move was to call the chief of staff to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth to notify her that he intended to recommend Moore for the award and “create the paperwork anew,” with approvals from the original chain of command.
That was a highly unusual preparatory step by a three-star general — one not typically available to other veterans.
But even with the Army secretary aware of the request, and a three-star general backing it, Moore still needed help from a higher authority: Congress.
The political help
Moore was moving quickly to address the Bronze Star problem, but Army regulations posed a hurdle. Commanders have two years to submit a soldier for an award following the act or period of service being recognized. Moore was 16 years past that deadline.
There is an exception. Under 10 U.S.C. 1130, a military department secretary may consider a late award if a member of Congress sponsors the request and asks for review.
Moore needed a congressional sponsor, but strangely, the request did not go through a member of Maryland’s delegation, raising the question of why.
According to a political source with knowledge of the matter, Moore believed his relationship with former Vice President Kamala Harris — developed while campaigning extensively in 2024 for former President Joe Biden, and then for Harris after Biden left the race — was strong enough that he could ask her office for help with his Bronze Star problem. Moore allegedly viewed the request as a “small ask,” the source said.
This is how then-U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, one of Harris’ closest political allies, became part of the process. Butler had been appointed to complete the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s term. California Gov. Gavin Newsom described Butler as a “trusted adviser to Vice President Harris,” and she had held a senior role in Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Spotlight has confirmed that Moore’s request for help went to the vice president’s office, but it has not independently established Harris’ level of involvement. Butler nevertheless agreed to sponsor the request.
According to the source, Moore chose this route to secure a quick resolution before the November 2024 election. Other possible paths to pursue the award were too lengthy, taking up to a year or more. If Harris lost, the source said, Moore felt he wouldn’t receive the same level of help from a Trump administration.
The Senator Butler Letter
On Nov. 12, 2024, Butler sent Wormuth a letter requesting approval of the Bronze Star for “CPT (R) Westley Moore [R is for retired].”
Spotlight obtained a copy of that letter.
Bulter’s request rested entirely on Fenzel’s claim that Moore had been approved for the Bronze Star in Afghanistan, but that the paperwork was lost, a claim that no evidence has been produced to support.
Butler wrote that Moore “was recommended and approved for a Bronze Star Medal in May 2006 due to his exemplary service and performance,” but that “the award was neither processed nor was it filed into his official Army records.”
She further wrote that “the leaders of the Combined Joint Task Force and approving authority who witnessed the distinguished service of CPT (R) Moore all agreed that the award was well deserved and, once again, recommended approval.” Butler asked Wormuth to approve the award so Moore could “finally be recognized as originally intended.”
The information Butler relied on appears to have come directly from Moore, Fenzel or both. Once the letter arrived, the Army moved with abnormal speed.
Seven days after Butler’s request reached the Secretary of the Army’s office, the Army approved Moore’s Bronze Star on Nov. 19, 2024.
That’s a peculiar speed, given that official guidance on Army websites informs veterans that, depending on the path they follow, they can expect award requests and appeals to take between six and 15 months to resolve.
Wormuth informed Moore at the Army-Navy game in Baltimore on Dec. 14 that he would receive the award. Fenzel presented it at an invitation-only ceremony at the Governor’s residence in Annapolis on Dec. 23, 2024. The Washington Post and Associated Press were in attendance. No local media from Baltimore were invited.
Moore’s award of the Bronze Star followed the embarrassment of The Times story. It involved a three-star general who was Moore’s longtime close friend, an interim senator from California with close ties to Vice President Harris, and an Army approval process that has not publicly disclosed the written recommendation, witness statements, original 2006 paperwork, or the written rationale required to be sent to Congress under federal law.
The complete lack of transparency was already troubling. Then, Spotlight obtained “the photograph.”
A troubling revelation
On March 1, 2006, Moore stood in formation at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan for an end-of-tour awards ceremony with the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division.
A photograph provided to Spotlight by retired Army Lt. Col. James “Jamie” Gottschling, Moore’s immediate supervisor during the deployment, shows him wearing an Army Commendation Medal, or ARCOM.
“The picture clearly shows Moore receiving an ARCOM, not a Bronze Star,” Gottschling said.
In the photo, the ARCOM is being presented by then-Col. Patrick J. Donahue, the brigade’s commander, who affirmed to Spotlight in November that he did not recommend Moore for a Bronze Star in 2006.
Gottschling said the ARCOM for Moore made sense.
“He was junior and he did not do the entire deployment,” Gottschling told Spotlight. “He did about half. That would make sense length of service matters.”
Asked whether Moore did anything that, in his view, would have merited a Bronze Star, Gottschling said, “No.”
Gottschling added that he did not recall the ARCOM being an interim award pending approval of a Bronze Star, and that the award was proportional to what other junior officers in his staff section received.
But the revelation of the ARCOM strikes at the core of the Bronze Star story told by Moore and Fenzel. It wasn’t a Bronze Star approval that got lost; it was paperwork for an ARCOM that’s missing from Moore’s records.
How the ARCOM changes the case
A lost Bronze Star is not a lost ARCOM.
Moore, Fenzel and Butler presented the 2024 request to the Army as if Moore had been recommended and approved for a Bronze Star in 2006, but the award was never approved, processed or entered into his records. In their telling, the request was simply a correction of an old administrative failure.
But the ceremony photograph and Gottschling’s account say otherwise: Moore wasn’t presented a Bronze Star. He was presented with an Army Commendation Medal.
That should have changed everything.
The first question should have been what happened to the ARCOM paperwork. The Army then should have determined whether the ARCOM was the award originally intended, as Gottschling says, or whether a Bronze Star recommendation had been submitted and downgraded by the approving authority, Combined Joint Task Force 76 commander Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya. Kamiya did not respond to questions from Spotlight.
Either answer would have materially changed the case.
If the ARCOM was the intended award, Moore’s 2024 request was not the correction of a lost Bronze Star, as Butler’s letter suggested. It was a new request for a higher decoration nearly 20 years later. That also should have required the Army to confront the fact that Moore had already received an ARCOM for the same deployment. Army regulations prohibit a soldier from receiving two decorations for the same act, achievement or period of service.
If a Bronze Star had been submitted but downgraded, then Moore’s 2024 request should have been treated as a reconsideration of a prior award decision.
And if the ARCOM paperwork was missing from Moore’s military record, then the first administrative problem was the ARCOM — not a Bronze Star.
But for politics, those realities would have prompted the Army to scrutinize Moore’s Bronze Star request far more closely and consider whether the matter belonged before the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records, established under 10 U.S.C. 1552. The issue was not merely missing paperwork. It’s that Moore’s 2024 request was built on a false premise — and whether material facts about the ARCOM he received in 2006 were withheld from the Army, from Butler, or from both.
An ABCMR review could have considered the original records, the missing ARCOM paperwork, the original chain of command, the approving authority’s intent and whether Moore’s Afghanistan performance warranted upgrading to a Bronze Star, a process that can take a year or more.
Butler’s letter did not present the case that way. She wrote that Moore had been “recommended and approved” for a Bronze Star in 2006 and that approval in 2024 would finally recognize him “as originally intended.”
The photograph of Moore receiving an ARCOM strongly suggests those statements were false.
Moore’s and Fenzel’s statements
Moore has made few public statements directly addressing the Bronze Star, largely allowing others to speak for him. But one he posted on a state website in response to The New York Times now complicates the lost-award explanation.
“Towards the end of my deployment, I was disappointed to learn that I hadn’t received the Bronze Star,” Moore said.
It’s a revealing sentence. It affirms Moore knew at the time he had not received the Bronze Star. Yet, he has never acknowledged that he was actually presented with an ARCOM at the end of his deployment.
Fenzel’s public statements are also difficult to reconcile with the ARCOM photograph, and especially so since he attended the ceremony.
Fenzel told The Times in 2024 that he advised Moore to include the Bronze Star on his White House Fellowship application because the award had been approved. He also said he had seen the recommendation signed by all appropriate officers, including the approving authority.
“I had never seen it signed by all of the appropriate individuals and then not be processed,” Fenzel said. A statement that evidence now suggests can’t be true.
But two years later, after Moore had obtained the Bronze Star, Fenzel provided a different account. In Rye Barcott’s 2026 book, “Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future,” Fenzel did not say he personally saw the approved paperwork. Instead, he said Moore’s award had been approved verbally by “VOCO,” or voice communications. But VOCO isn’t how awards are approved.
Federal law and Army regulation specify that awards are not official until a written permanent order is signed and published by the appropriate command-level authority.
It appears that Fenzel played a central role in helping Moore secure the Bronze Star retroactively using a storyline that excluded key evidence. If Moore and Fenzel knowingly presented federal officials with a false account of what happened in 2006, it would violate 18 U.S.C. 1001 and Article 107 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
A citation with significant errors
Moore’s 2024 Bronze Star citation contains factual errors that should have been addressed before a retroactive award was approved nearly two decades later.
Those errors suggest the Army accepted information submitted by a senator’s office without verifying it against Moore’s official military records. They also raise questions about Moore’s role in reconstructing his own award package.
Text messages obtained by Spotlight show Fenzel and Moore communicating directly about the retroactive request. Fenzel asked Moore, “Do you have a copy of the recommendation?” and “What date did you redeploy from Afghanistan to the U.S.?”
Those questions suggest Moore may have helped reconstruct his own award recommendation and citation, including the dates used to describe his service in Afghanistan.
Those dates were wrong.
Moore’s DD-214 shows that he arrived in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2005, and departed on March 14, 2006. Included is roughly 30 days of emergency leave spent back home in the U.S.
But Moore’s Bronze Star citation lists his Afghanistan service as being Aug. 2, 2005, to May 15, 2006.
Those dates, apparently provided by Moore, credit him with 75 additional days beyond the Afghanistan service period reflected in his DD-214. If his emergency leave is also accounted for, the unsupported time grows to roughly 105 days.
Gottschling said one reason Moore received an ARCOM was that he did not serve the full deployment. He said officers who were not present the entire time typically received a lesser decoration than the Bronze Star. This may be why the dates in the citation were exaggerated.
The expanded timeframe matters because it moves Moore’s deployed time closer to his public narrative. Moore has repeatedly described his Afghanistan deployment as lasting a year or more. The dates in the citation make his service in Afghanistan appear much longer than it actually was.
The citation also refers to Moore as “Captain (Retired) Westley O. Moore,” although Moore did not serve in the Army Reserve long enough to earn retired officer status. Military retirement is not an honorific. It is an official status carrying privileges and recognition that Moore’s record does not support.
Gottschling said the citation also overstated Moore’s role.
Gottschling said it “clearly embellishes time and scope. It talks about 13 subordinate organizations [for which Moore controlled information operations], but those did not exist in the way the certificate suggests.”
In a retroactive award approved in just seven days after a public political controversy, those errors are not harmless. They directly call the award’s legitimacy into question.
Spotlight asked Moore if he wrote his own Bronze Star recommendation in 2024, and he has not answered.
The outgoing Army Secretary’s failed compliance
Under 10 U.S.C. 1130, the law used to process Moore’s Bronze Star, the Secretary of the Army must submit to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and to the requesting member of Congress “a detailed discussion of the rationale supporting the determination” to approve or deny the award.
That report would provide significant insight into the Army’s 2024 decision to approve Moore’s Bronze Star. But the Army has refused to release it to Spotlight, citing a Freedom of Information Act exemption protecting certain recommendations and opinions exchanged among agency officials during the decision-making process.
Spotlight has also sought the report through congressional channels, but so far, the document has not been located. If its existence cannot be verified, that raises another serious question: whether the Secretary of the Army, under the outgoing Biden administration, complied with a mandatory federal reporting requirement.
Another award complicates the Bronze Star claim
The March 1, 2006, photograph shows Moore receiving more than the ARCOM. It also appears to show him receiving the Combat Action Badge, or CAB.
But the CAB permanent orders released, not by the Army, but by Moore’s team, are dated May 1, 2006 — almost two months after the ceremony and well after Moore had redeployed home.
That timing matters. If the brigade command team was comfortable pinning the CAB on Moore’s uniform months before permanent orders were issued, and if Fenzel’s accounts about Moore’s Bronze Star being approved were true, why did it not also present Moore with the Bronze Star, pending approval, at the same ceremony?
Why present the ARCOM instead?
One possible explanation is that Moore had been submitted for the Bronze Star, but the recommendation was downgraded by the proper approving authority. If so, brigade leaders would have been obligated to present the award actually approved: the Army Commendation Medal.
The other possibility is simpler. The ARCOM was the award Moore was intended to receive all along.
Either way, the photograph damages Moore’s claim that he left Afghanistan with an approved-but-lost Bronze Star. It shows him being presented with a different medal. And when paired with the later CAB orders, it raises an interesting question: If the command was willing to pin one not-yet-approved award on Moore’s uniform, why not also do it for the Bronze Star?
