Republicans on the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Department of Homeland Security for information on Gov. Tim Walz’s, D-Minn., alleged connections to the Chinese Communist Party. Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said the committee received whistleblower disclosures regarding a non-classified Microsoft Teams chat group and intelligence reports that contain information regarding the vice presidential candidate’s ties to the Chinese government.
Walz’s relationship with China goes back 35 years. The Walz campaign told Minnesota Public Radio that the governor has been there approximately 15 times.
It began in May 1989, just one month after Tiananmen Square, when he spent a year teaching English through Harvard’s World Teach Program. Walz once recounted his arrival.
“I still remember the train station in Hong Kong,” Walz said during a 2014 congressional hearing. “It was a large number, especially European, I think, very angry that we would, we would still go after what had happened. But it was my belief at that time that the diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people. And the opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”
Walz and his wife honeymooned in China. They also took hundreds of high school students on annual trips from 1993 until the early 2000s. They stopped organizing the trips once he became a member of Congress in 2006.
The Oversight Committee said this subpoena is part of its ongoing investigation into the CCP’s efforts to infiltrate and influence American political policy.
“If a state governor and major political party’s nominee for Vice President of the United States has been a witting or unwitting participant in the CCP’s efforts to weaken our nation, this would strongly suggest that there are alarming weaknesses in the federal government’s effort to defend the United States from the CCP’s political warfare that must be urgently addressed,” Comer said in a statement.
The committee is now demanding all communications from the Microsoft chat group and all Intelligence reports and notes related to Gov. Walz by Oct. 7.
