Josh Rogers published the piece on 24 August, fifteen days before the first district primary. It runs through three claims and takes each apart carefully.

Start with the arithmetic. Sullivan tells voters she spent six years in the Obama administration. Her actual jobs at the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs ran two years, from 2014 to 2016. Getting to six means counting four years as an unpaid board member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, a post she held from June 2010 to October 2014 while working full-time at PepsiCo as a zone director.

Then there’s health care. Her campaign website said she was proud to be part of the administration when it passed the Affordable Care Act. But the law was signed in March 2010, and Sullivan was at PepsiCo. Asked about the gap, her campaign changed the word “passed” to “implemented.” Her only government role at that point was the monuments board, which had nothing to do with carrying out the law.

Sharpest of the three is the one on video. At a Manchester Public TV forum in May she said she had sat across the table from Netanyahu. Pressed for detail, she pointed to a trip Defense Secretary Ash Carter took to the Middle East after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That trip came two weeks after she started at the Pentagon. Her campaign later said she was one of eight Americans in the room at the Tel Aviv meeting.

Say this part loudly, because the failure mode for a site like ours is letting the headline blur into something it isn’t. Rogers states her military record plainly and does not dispute a word of it. She graduated from Northwestern in 2001, joined the Marine Corps, rose to captain, and served in the Iraq War including Fallujah in 2005. She holds the Navy Commendation Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.

That matters because “veteran candidate accused of embellishing” is a phrase that collapses in most readers’ heads into stolen valor, and this is not that. Nothing about the uniform is in dispute here. What’s in dispute is how a former Marine has described the office jobs she took nine years after leaving the Corps.

We’d rather draw that line ourselves than let someone else draw it badly. A publication arguing that service is an electoral asset has a standing obligation to be precise about what has and hasn’t been challenged, particularly when the answer is inconvenient in one direction and reassuring in the other.

Here’s where we can add something rather than summarise. Rogers describes her Pentagon roles as under a year as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, then a year as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. His piece notes she worked at Veterans Affairs in public affairs but never gives that title.

That title was Assistant Secretary. On 1 October 2014 the White House announced her appointment as Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs. When Ash Carter announced her move to the Pentagon in June 2015, the Defense Department release identified her by that office. The Congressional Directory for 2016 lists her in it by name. She was the principal public affairs adviser to VA Secretary Robert McDonald, and the same post had been held a few years earlier by Tammy Duckworth.

So the most senior position she ever held in government is the one missing from the list of titles in a story about inflated titles. That’s worth saying, and it doesn’t rescue anything. Two years is still not six. She still wasn’t in government when the Affordable Care Act passed. One of eight people in a room is still not across the table from a prime minister.

Put it at full strength, because it’s a serious argument. We don’t think it’s wrong either.

Sullivan isn’t running on biography in the abstract. She’s running specifically on the claim that her government experience separates her from the field, which makes the accuracy of that experience the central question rather than a side issue. If the differentiator is inflated, the differentiator is gone.

Look at the shape of it, too. These aren’t three unrelated slips. All three run the same direction, toward more seniority and closer proximity to power than the record supports, and one of them was written on a campaign website and then quietly reworded rather than withdrawn. A single loose sentence at a forum is a gaffe. Three is a habit.

There’s also a cost that lands on every other veteran running this cycle. When service is treated as an asset, candidates get an incentive to stretch the claims sitting next to it, and voters who catch one stretch tend to discount the whole biography. The true part gets marked down along with the rest. That’s the real damage here, and it isn’t limited to one campaign in one district.

We accept most of this. Where we’d push back is narrow. Nothing in the reporting suggests she invented a job or a medal, and the underlying record is genuinely strong: a Marine captain in Fallujah who came back and ran a federal agency’s public affairs shop before she turned 37. Her claims fail against her own record, which is an unusual and somewhat sad way to fail.

Three things are worth tracking. One of them is a date rather than an argument.

Timing works in her favour, oddly enough. Absentee ballots went out on 11 August, so a share of this electorate voted before Rogers published. Meanwhile the same Monday that carried his story also carried Heath Howard’s withdrawal and his endorsement of Beriont, which is the news that actually dominated the week in this district. A resume story competing with a field-narrowing story usually loses.

Second, watch the debate. The candidates meet at Saint Anselm College on 1 September, and that’s the first setting where a rival can raise this to her face in front of an audience. Beriont has run on refusing PAC money and on being the candidate without a machine, so she has the cleanest angle. Whether she takes it will say more about her read of the electorate than about the facts.

Third, watch the independents. The Saint Anselm crosstab had Sullivan and Shaheen level among Democrats at 24 and 23, with Sullivan up 30 to 24 among undeclared voters who can pull a Democratic ballot. Her whole margin sits in that group. Character questions tend to hit hardest with partisans who already have a second choice, and undeclared voters in New Hampshire have historically cared less about a candidate’s paper than about whether they sound like they mean it.

None of that is a prediction. It’s a list of the places where this either shows up or doesn’t, and by 8 September we’ll know which.

We’ve written about Sullivan twice this month and we’ll likely write about her again after the primary. Skipping an unflattering report about a candidate whose case we’ve explained would be the sort of thing that makes a publication useless.

A second reason matters more, and it’s specific to what this site argues. Our claim has always been narrow: military service moves independents and soft Republicans in a general election. It has never been that veterans are better people, or that a service record settles questions about everything else on a candidate’s page. A story like this one is a test of whether we meant the narrow version. If a veteran’s civilian claims don’t hold up, the honest thing is to report that the civilian claims don’t hold up, say clearly that the service didn’t come into it, and let readers weigh both.

Sullivan’s answer, for what it’s worth, is that the times are serious and voters need someone grounded in service and in experience. Half of that is not in question. Voters get eleven days to decide about the second.