Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has visited the People’s Republic of China 30 times. He even honeymooned there with his wife.
On August 16, House Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Ray demanding several documents as part of an investigation into Walz’s “concerning ties to the People’s Republic of China.”
Comer wrote to Wray: “It has come to the Committee’s attention that Governor Walz has longstanding connections to CCP-connected entities and officials that make him susceptible to the Party’s strategy of elite capture, which seeks to co-opt influential figures in elite political, cultural, and academic circles to influence the United States to the benefit of the communist regime and the detriment of Americans.”
He added, “FBI briefers told the Committee that the Bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) investigates exactly the kind of activity that has since come to light about Governor Walz.”
Comer cited a number of reasons for the committee’s investigation. In 1993, as a teacher, Walz organized a trip to China for Alliance High School students, where costs were paid by the Chinese government. In 1994, Walz set up a private company named Educational Travel Adventures, Inc., which coordinated annual student trips to China until 2003, and was led by Walz himself. “The corporation was reportedly dissolved four days after he took congressional office in 2007,” the Committee reported.
While serving in Congress, Walz also served as a fellow at the Macau Polytechnic University, a Chinese institution that characterizes itself as having a “long held devotion to and love for the motherland.” And in 2019, Walz headlined the 27th National Convention for the U.S. China Peoples Friendship Association in Minnesota, where he spoke alongside the president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), “which, a year later, the Department of State exposed as ‘a Beijing-based organization tasked with co-opting subnational governments,’ including efforts ‘to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.’”
The Comer-led committee is demanded the FBI hand over all the documents and communications it has regarding any Chinese entity or person with whom Walz “may have engaged or partnered.”
Weeks went by and the FBI produced nothing. By September 12, Comer sent another letter, reiterating the committee’s initial demand and pointing out that the “deadline to produce such documents and information has passed, and the Bureau has failed to provide any response to the Committee.” In the letter Comer calls the FBI silence “inexcusable.”
In his more recent letter, Comer added another reason Walz is suspect. “Recent reports indicate Mr. Walz, while in Congress, ‘helped secure over $2 million’ and ‘pushed for a $5 million federal earmark’ for the Hormel Institute, which is a ‘Minnesota-based medical research center with a history of working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.'” The Hormel Institute, Comer added, has also worked with the Beijing Genomics Institute, “a group labeled by the Pentagon as a ‘Chinese
military company.”
On Monday, September 24, the litigation advocacy group America First Legal announced it too was investigating Walz’s China ties.
