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WASHINGTON — The commanding officer of a 2008 tour in Afghanistan that included then-U.S. Army Major Troy Nehls told The Texas Tribune that he recalls awarding the now-congressman his second Bronze Star award.

That award — which recognizes service members who show heroism in the field — has been called into question after a CBS investigation reported Nehls had been touting military decorations that did not match his service record provided by the Pentagon. In campaign ads and in his House biography, Nehls, R-Richmond, has posted pictures wearing an Army uniform and two Bronze Star medals. He has also worn the Combat Infantryman Badge lapel pin, awarded to soldiers for service in combat.

The investigation found that the Pentagon reported Nehls received only one Bronze star and that the Combat Infantryman Badge was awarded in error and rescinded in 2023. Nehls, who has been publicly criticized by members of his own party amid the claims of stolen valor, said on social media that he did have two Bronze Stars. But he has since stopped wearing the CIB.

But Jason Burke, the Navy captain who led the 130-person joint task force Nehls served on during his tour, recalled awarding the medal to Nehls. Nehls received the medal at a ceremony with several other officers in the fall of 2008, shortly before Nehls finished his tour and returned to Texas, Burke told the Tribune.

“You're getting that award if you've done a good job and met the criteria,” said the now-retired Burke, who is listed on the award certificate as Nehls' commanding officer. “He earned it, and received it.”

Nehls, who represents a swath of Houston suburbs, served as Burke's second-in-command under a joint effort called Task Force Currahee. Their unit, which included both Army and Navy officers, worked on provincial reconstruction, building roads, clinics and schools in eastern Afghanistan's Ghazni Province. Burke said the team's convoys regularly came under Taliban ambushes and guerrilla attacks.

The Bronze Star award must be recommended by a commander, and any service member in any branch of the military working an operation involving a conflict with an opposing force is eligible. The CIB, by contrast, is only given to those in combat roles.

It was relatively standard during the U.S.'s war on terrorism, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, for officers of certain ranks to receive a some kind of award upon completing a tour, often a Bronze Star. Nehls' first star was awarded for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004, where he trained 13 staff members of an Iraqi government office to perform financial assessments, according to the certificate.

A spokesperson for Nehls declined to comment on this story, pointing to a post on X Nehls made last month defending his record and posting photos of the certificates of his two Bronze Stars, and his copy of the underlying nomination forms. Burke's sign-off can be seen on the 2008 documentation, known as a Form 638, along with signatures from two higher-level officials.

CBS reported the Pentagon would conduct another review of Nehls' record. The most recent summary of his service and awards, provided to the Tribune by a Pentagon spokesperson on Friday, lists only one Bronze Star and no CIB.

The systems for keeping records for military awards can be difficult to navigate. A soldier often becomes responsible for making sure awards paperwork is turned over to a personnel officer.

That means documentation for awards sometimes slips through the cracks, according to retired Army sergeant Anthony Anderson, who has investigated numerous instances of stolen valor.

“I wouldn't say it's common, but it does happen,” Anderson said.

Anderson said he had previously spoken with Nehls' chief of staff, encouraging them to submit documentation of the second Bronze Star to the Pentagon to be added to Nehls record.

He said he would be surprised if an officer in Nehls' position hadn't received a Bronze Star.

Nehls' military record has become a thorn for him in recent months. He announced that he would stop wearing the Combat Infantryman Badge last week in response to reports that the badge had been revoked in 2023.

Nehls was found to be ineligible for that badge because he had served in Afghanistan in a civil role, not as a combatant infantryman. Nehls did serve as an infantryman during his time with the Wisconsin National Guard in the 1990s, completing a tour in Bosnia.

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A Texas court on Monday set an execution date for Robert Roberson, who was sentenced to death in 2003 for killing his 2-year-old daughter but has consistently challenged the conviction on the claim that it was based on questionable science.

Roberson has maintained his innocence while being held on death row for more than 20 years. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals previously halted his execution in 2016. But in 2023, the state's highest criminal court decided that doubt over the cause of his daughter's death was not enough to overturn his death sentence.

His new execution date is set for Oct. 17.

Roberson's attorneys objected to the scheduling of an execution after Anderson County prosecutors requested on June 17 that a date be set. His attorneys said they have new evidence to bolster their case and that they planned to file a new request to overturn his conviction.

As a result, his attorneys argued, setting an execution date would be “premature and unjust.”

Roberson was convicted of killing his sickly 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, after he rushed her blue, limp body to the hospital. He said that Nikki fell from the bed while they were sleeping in their home in the East Texas town of Palestine and that he awoke to find her unresponsive. But doctors and nurses, who were unable to revive her, did not believe such a low fall could have caused the fatal injuries and suspected child abuse.

At trial, doctors testified that Nikki's death was consistent with shaken baby syndrome — in which an infant is severely injured from being shaken violently back and forth — and a jury convicted Roberson.

The Court of Criminal Appeals in 2016 stopped his execution and sent the case back to the trial court after the scientific consensus around shaken baby syndrome diagnoses came into question. Many doctors believe the condition is used as an explanation for an infant's death too often in criminal cases, without considering other possibilities and the baby's medical history.

The Court of Criminal Appeals' decision was largely a product of a 2013 state law, dubbed the “junk science law,” which allows Texas courts to overturn a conviction when the scientific evidence used to reach a verdict has since changed or been discredited. Lawmakers, in passing the law, highlighted cases of infant trauma that used faulty science to convict defendants as examples of the cases the legislation was meant to target.

Roberson's attorneys, in their opposition to setting an execution date, cited “overwhelming new evidence” that Nikki died of “natural and accidental causes” — not due to head trauma.

They wrote that Nikki had “severe, undiagnosed” pneumonia that caused her to stop breathing, collapse and turn blue before she was discovered. Then, instead of identifying her pneumonia, doctors prescribed her Phenergan and codeine, drugs that are no longer given to children her age, further suppressing her breathing, they argued.

“It is irrefutable that Nikki's medical records show that she was severely ill during the last week of her life,” Roberson's attorneys wrote, noting that in the week before her death, Roberson had taken Nikki to the emergency room because she had been coughing, wheezing and struggling with diarrhea for several days, and to her pediatrician's office, where her temperature came in at 104.5 degrees.

“There was a tragic, untimely death of a sick child whose impaired, impoverished father did not know how to explain what has confounded the medical community for decades,” Roberson's attorneys wrote.

They have also argued that new scientific evidence suggests that it is impossible to shake a toddler to death without causing serious neck injuries, which Nikki did not have.

And they cited developments in a similar case in Dallas County, in which a man was convicted of injuring a child. His conviction was based in part on now partially recanted testimony from a child abuse expert who provided similar testimony on shaken baby syndrome in Roberson's case. Prosecutors in Dallas County have said the defendant should get a new trial.

In 2023, when the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Roberson a new trial, prosecutors argued that the evidence supporting Roberson's conviction was still “clear and convincing” and that the science around shaken baby syndrome had not changed as much as his defense attorneys claimed. Witnesses also testified at trial that Roberson had a bad temper and would shake and spank Nikki when she would not stop crying.

The scheduling of Roberson's execution triggers a series of deadlines for any last filings in state and federal court to seek relief and begin a request for clemency.

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The U.S. Supreme Court sent the legal challenge to a Texas social media law back to a lower court, sidestepping a landmark ruling for now.

The legal battle centers on Texas' law preventing large social media companies from censoring users' content based on their political viewpoints.

On Monday, the Court said the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had not properly analyzed the full scope of the legal challenge and redirected the case back to the lower court for relitigation. The Supreme Court sent a similar Florida case back to the Eleventh Circuit. Both states' laws will remain blocked while the challenge continues.

Writing for the majority, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said neither court had fully considered how far the Florida and Texas laws could reach.

“The question in such a case is whether a law's unconstitutional applications are substantial compared to its constitutional ones,” Kagan wrote. “To make that judgment, a court must determine a law's full set of applications, evaluate which are constitutional and which are not, and compare the one to the other. Neither court performed that necessary inquiry.”

The 2021 law, called House Bill 20, was championed by Republican state leaders in an effort to combat a perceived anti-conservative bias on social media platforms — a sentiment further spurred by social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, suspending former president Donald Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol.

The suit was filed by NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association who argued that social media have a First Amendment right to manage the content on their platforms and select the types of speech they deem appropriate — similar to curated publishing platforms like newspapers. And tech companies say that allowing government control over their content could lead to a surge of misinformation, which would be detrimental to users.

In a Monday morning statement, CCIA President Matt Schruers said he was pleased that the court seemed to recognize the First Amendment challenges in Texas and Florida's social media laws.

“We are encouraged that a majority of the Court has made clear that the government cannot tilt public debate in its favored direction,” the statement said. “There is nothing more Orwellian than government attempting to dictate what speech should be carried, whether it is a newspaper or a social media site.”

Attorneys for Texas framed the law as an extension of regulations that prohibit discrimination in facilities and services open to the public. They emphasized the significant market power of social media platforms and argued that regulation is necessary to protect the public interest and ensure these platforms do not misuse their influence. The state's lawyers also argued that the regulation law is narrowly focused, applying only to platforms with over 50 million users, and allows users to filter unwanted content, thus promoting voluntary communication.

Following the court's ruling, Attorney General Ken Paxton said on X that “Big Tech censorship is one of the biggest threats to free public discourse and election integrity.”

“No American should be silenced by Big Tech oligarchs,” Paxton said.

A lawsuit filed against a similar law in Florida by the same plaintiffs was also heard in the Supreme Court. In that case, the law was focused on preventing social media platforms from banning politicians.

While both laws were passed in response to perceived bias, social media companies refute claims of removing content or blocking users due to their viewpoints. They do enforce policies against explicitly graphic content, bullying, hate speech, and dangerous misinformation.

“You have here the first state laws that attempt to regulate how social media platforms moderate their content, and that's why they're enormously important and why the court's decision here is of such great importance,” said Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

Wilkens explained that throughout the court's history, it has recognized the importance of “editorial judgment for entities that disseminate speech to the public.” He noted that it has upheld this principle with respect to newspapers, public utilities sending newsletters, and even parades.

“The importance of social media platforms to free speech online cannot be overstated, as the Supreme Court has said before, that they are the modern public square,” he said. “There is so much at stake when the government tries to regulate free speech online. And that's why these cases are so important.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who had previously upheld the House Bill 20, did not believe these protections extended to social media platforms, writing that they “reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”

Two sections of the Texas law were challenged in this case. One provision prevented social media companies from censoring content based on the author's viewpoint expressed on their platform or “through any other medium.” The second required social media companies to notify users if they remove their content, explain why they removed it, provide complaint and appeals processes for removed content, and to biannually report all removed content.

Oral arguments in the case mainly centered around the content-moderation restrictions. The ruling creates a previously missing legal framework for the treatment of social media in matters surrounding moderation and freedom of speech.

The Supreme Court released another decision pertaining to social media on Wednesday where the court examined whether federal officials unlawfully pressured social media platforms to censor COVID-19 and election-related content. That case questioned if the government's actions, including frequent communications and recommendations to the platforms, infringed on free speech rights; ultimately, the plaintiffs could not demonstrate a direct connection, leading to a lack of standing to sue.

Disclosure: Facebook has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!