By
After many failed attempts to advance their impeachment probe into President Joe Biden, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are shifting to a new target: Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz.
Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., on Friday announced an investigation into Walz’s ties with China, asking FBI Director Christopher Wray for information about the Minnesota Democrat’s dealings with the country. Comer wrote in his letter:
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.
Comer also claimed that Walz has had “problematic engagement” with Chinese “entities” that is antithetical to the effort to “identify and defeat CCP unrestricted warfare against America.”
A spokesperson for Walz told The Washington Post, “Republicans are twisting basic facts and desperately lying to distract from the Trump-Vance agenda: praising dictators, and sending American jobs to China.”
Walz’s personal relationship to China is well-documented. He spent a year teaching English in Foshan in southern China, arriving shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre. For nearly a decade into the early 2000s, he and his wife, Gwen Walz, arranged educational visits to China for high school students. Walz has said that he’s traveled to the country around 30 times, including for his honeymoon.
Yet Walz has taken positions that would not have endeared him to the Chinese government. As a member of Congress, he met with Tibetan leaders and Chinese dissidents, and he served on a congressional commission that tracks human rights abuses in China. In 2017, he co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act; Jeffrey Ngo, a senior policy and research fellow at the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, credited its passage years later to Walz’s early support.
Despite interest from the Chinese public in Walz’s history with their country, some experts on Chinese politics have said it’s unlikely that the relationship between Washington, D.C., and Beijing would ease even if he and Harris take the White House. Still, Walz’s approach to U.S. relations with China is arguably more nuanced than many American politicians’.
“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” Walz said in a 2016 interview.
As Donald Trump and his campaign struggle to find an effective point of attack against Walz, Republicans are seizing on an opportunity to portray the governor’s history with China as something suspicious. With the Oversight Committee’s investigation, Comer, who as committee chair has a history of partisan investigations into Trump opponents, now takes it up a notch.