Rep. James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about unspecified allegations of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) connections against Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
In a letter accompanying the subpoena released on Thursday, Comer said the House Oversight and Accountability Committee received information from a whistleblower about “serious concern among Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel regarding a longstanding connection between” Tim Walz and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The letter was issued just one day before Walz is set to debate Trump vice-presidential pick JD Vance in the televised debate on Tuesday. Per the Hill:
Specifically, Comer pointed to a nonclassified chat that DHS employees used on Microsoft Teams titled “NST NFT Bi-Weekly Sync” that he said contains relevant information, in addition to further classified and unclassified documents in the control of DHS. The acronym stands for “Nation State Threat — National Functional Team,” according to the committee.
Comer did not go into detail about what kind of concerns were raised about Walz’s alleged connection to China but said the information came through a whistleblower.
The subpoena gave a deadline of Oct. 7 to produce the communication in the Microsoft Teams group chat relating to Walz from July 1, 2024, to present, as well as any intelligence information reports or regional intelligence notes since Nov. 2023 to present relating to Walz, his staff, or his gubernatorial office.
The letter specified that the committee began investigating CCP influence in the United States government “long before Governor Walz was elevated to be the vice-presidential candidate” for Kamala Harris.
“In particular, 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 wrote.
A former educator, Walz spent a year teaching in China in 1989 and visited the country many times after while leading field trips to the country. House Republicans have been questioning his ties to the CCP since Kamala Harris tapped him as her VP pick.
The letter from Comer dropped on the same day that the Washington Free Beacon released a report debunking a claim Walz made during a 2014 congressional hearing wherein he said that he had been in Hong Kong during China’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Walz was, in fact, at home in Nebraska at the time.
“I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ‘89,” he said at the time. “And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.”
“There was a large number of, especially European, I think, very angry that 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,” he added.
Media outlets from New York Times, CBS News, and National Public Radio have repeated Walz’s story when “in reality, local news reports show that Walz was at home in Nebraska in May and June of 1989, as protests convulsed China and the government’s response turned the world’s attention to its gross human rights violations,” according to the Beacon.
Walz did not depart for China until August that year.
“Contemporaneous news reports show Walz touring a National Guard storeroom in Alliance, Nebraska, in May 1989. They indicate that Walz did not leave the United States until August of that year, at least two months after the student protests ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre,” the report added.
