Oversight Committee drops internal DHS communication on Walz-China concerns from whistleblower

The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday released a “small portion” of internal Department of Homeland Security communications shared by a whistleblower that show officials raised concerns about Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s longstanding connections to China and the Chinese Communist Party. 

The move follows DHS’s failure to respond to the committee’s subpoena for any intelligence documents and internal communications referring to Walz and any connections to the Chinese Communist Party. 

“DHS has been unresponsive to the subpoena. Because of DHS’s lack of compliance with the Committee’s legal subpoena and unwillingness to cooperate in good faith, the Committee is releasing a small portion of the Department’s internal communications it received from a whistleblower,” Oversight Chairman James Comer wrote in a letter to the agency. 

Included in the Kentuck Republican's letter is one internal DHS communication on the Microsoft Teams platform from the day that Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris selected Walz to be her running mate. It shows one official expressed concerns to colleagues about Walz’s potential to be influenced by China given his longstanding relationship with the country. 

“Walt’s [sic] got the Vp. You all have no idea how this feeds into what the prc [China] has been doing here with him and local gov,” the unidentified official wrote. “It’s seriously a line of intel. Target someone who is perceived they can get to DC.”

You can read Comer’s letter and the communication below: 

Comer said his committee chose to release the above message as an example of the communications shared by the whistleblower that show DHS officials expressing concerns about how the Chinese Communist Party targets local politicians – in this case Walz, the governor of Midwestern Minnesota. 

“The Committee’s concerns surrounding CCP elite capture operations seeking to influence public officials like Governor Walz have intensified given recent reports about Governor Walz’s extensive travel history, unusual interactions in the People’s Republic of China, and recent inability to answer basic questions about his involvement in China,” Comer wrote. 

As the vice-presidential nominee, Walz has come under scrutiny by Republicans for his history with China dating back to his stint as an English teacher in 1989 just months after the Chinese government cracked down on pro-democracy protestors in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Walz was also unable to answer whether he was in Hong Kong at the time of the protests as he originally claimed.

By the 1990s, Walz began organizing regular trips to China for his high school students and even took his honeymoon in the communist country when he married his wife in 1994. 

In addition to the numerous trips to China with his students, Walz also welcomed a delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials to his classroom in Nebraska when he was a teacher there, the Daily Caller reported. He has also reportedly praised the Chinese communist system, saying “everyone is the same and everyone shares” in China.

The Chinese efforts to influence subnational leaders, like state governors and legislators, is a method favored by the Communist Party, according to the House Oversight Committee report on Chinese influence and the Biden Administration’s response. The report followed a broader investigation by the committee into the communist country’s efforts to penetrate and influence the United States at all levels.

“The CCP has been successfully targeting and infiltrating U.S. state and local government officials for decades,” the committee concluded in its final report. It also found that the Biden Administration had failed to develop a strategy to combat Chinese influence operations like these, which often include economic incentives for state and local officials.