House Republicans are working to obtain Department of Homeland Security documents related to Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s connections to China after a whistleblower revealed their existence in protected disclosures.
House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) is sending a subpoena to DHS for intelligence reports on Walz’s ties to China and records from an internal Microsoft Teams group chat with information about Walz.
“Specifically, through whistleblower disclosures, the Committee has learned of a non-classified, Microsoft Teams group chat among DHS employees—titled ‘NST NFT Bi-Weekly Sync’—that contains information about Governor Walz that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation. The Committee has also learned that further relevant information regarding Governor Walz has been memorialized in both classified and unclassified documents in the control of DHS,” Comer said in a subpoena cover letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The subpoena instructs DHS to turn over the documents no later than October 7.
“The information required of DHS by the Committee’s subpoena will inform the Committee’s understanding of how successful the CCP has been in waging political warfare in and against the United States, how effectively federal agencies are addressing the communist regime’s campaign, and what reforms are necessary to counter this threat,” Comer added.
The oversight panel is investigating the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to infiltrate U.S. institutions and influence American political leaders. Comer opened its investigation into Walz’s longstanding ties to China after Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz to be her running mate in August. Harris’s selection of Walz brought fresh scrutiny to his engagements with China and his political record. Earlier this month, Comer accused the FBI of withholding information in its possession from the committee relevant to its investigation.
As a school teacher and politician, Walz went on many trips to China dating back to the 1990s. One of those trips doubled as a honeymoon after Walz planned his wedding around the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Until at least 2007, when he was a newly elected congressman, Walz was a visiting fellow at Macao Polytechnic University, an institution linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an economic investment program that the Chinese Communist Party uses to expand its geopolitical influence.
While in congress, Walz secured millions in research funding for the Hormel Institute, a research institution that collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab where Covid-19 is thought to have originated from, according to the Washington Examiner. Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have worked alongside China’s People’s Liberation Army on public health research separate from the lab’s gain-of-function experiments on Covid-19 strains, the office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a report declassified last year.
Walz is an advocate for a U.S.-China relationship built on mutual cooperation rather than adversarial competition, an approach that differs from most policy analysts worried about China’s geopolitical rise and economic growth. On the flip side, Walz has criticized the Chinese government’s rampant human-rights abuses.