The House Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) over his numerous connections to China, which include a student exchange program funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Chinese secret police station operating in the Twin Cities, and much more.
Chairman James Comer (R-KY) launched the investigation “following reports detailing the Governor’s longstanding connections to Chinese Communist Party entities and officials,” according to the House Oversight Committee.
“Mr. Walz has visited China 30 times, served as a fellow at a Chinese institution that maintains a devotion to the CCP, and spoke alongside the President of a Chinese organization the State Department exposed as a CCP effort to influence and co-opt local leaders,” the House Oversight Committee said in a statement, revealing that “FBI briefers recently informed the Committee that the Bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force investigates CCP activity that is similar to China’s engagement with Governor Walz.”
“In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chairman Comer is now requesting information, documents, and communications related to the CCP-connected entities and officials Governor Walz has engaged and partnered with,” the committee added:
“Americans deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes,” Comer said in a statement.
“Governor Walz: Visited China at least 30 times. Served as a fellow at a Chinese institution that maintains a devotion to the CCP. Spoke alongside the President of a Chinese organization the State Department exposed as a CCP effort to influence local leaders,” he said, providing a few examples:
Indeed, Walz has a longstanding history of adoration for China, starting with student exchange program funded by the CCP.
“The concerns are, look, you know, you can like China. You can like the Chinese people. The question is, when you set up an exchange program, as he did, to bring students to China, you’re not dealing with the Chinese people — you’re dealing with the Chinese Communist Party,” New York Times bestselling author and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer said during a recent appearance on Breitbart News Daily, detailing Walz’s numerous connections with China and Chinese entities.
“And in the case of his program, it’s funded by the CCP. It was organized with the help of the CCP,” he said, noting that Walz reportedly told students to “downplay” their Americanness.
“And when you start to look at some of the, you know, activities involving the students, it gets slightly odd. I mean, you know, some of the local press accounts from the Midwest report that students were told by Walz, ‘When you go to China, downplay your Americanness,’ which is, is kind of odd, because if you’re having a cultural exchange, the purpose is to actually learn about the other culture,” Schweizer noted, explaining that, in contrast, it would never be asked of Chinese students to downplay their Chineseness.
But Walz’s connections go far beyond that, as he also has what Schweizer described as an “odd relationship with the Chinese state,” choosing to give a speech in 2019 to an organization which served as a front group for the CCP.
“And yet, in 2019 he goes and gives them a speech,” he said, noting that Walz, who chose to get married on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, has a certain tone of warmth about him when he discusses China.
“Whenever he talks about China, it’s with a lot of warmth. And whenever there are issues raised about its human rights situation, there’s always a well, you know, we have the same kind of thing. We have the same problems. You know, the most famous one he did in 2010 was talking about the Tiananmen Square Massacre, when 10,000 people were killed by the Chinese military. And he said, ‘Well, you know, we had Wounded Knee.’ You know, of course, Wounded Knee was in the 19th century. Casualties were, you know, maybe one percent. It was a horrible situation. I’m not minimizing it, but to compare Wounded Knee with Tiananmen Square is kind of the ridiculous kind of comparisons that he tries to draw to sort of normalize CCP behavior,” Schweizer explained.
Further, Schweizer highlighted the existence of “secret police stations that the Chinese have here in the United States,” serving as “so-called united front groups that exist in the West.” These “secret police stations,” which cooperate with Chinese intelligence, are used by the CCP to intimidate Chinese who are living in the U.S. and are critical of the CCP.
“What happens is they will literally go around and visit people and say, hey, you know you need to shut up. You need to stop talking about this. You need to stop being so critical of the government. And there actually have been at least half a dozen documented cases where these networks have actually been involved in abducting people, that is, Chinese that are living in the United States, abducting them” and sending them back to mainland China, he continued.
The reason this applies to Walz is because one of those entities is in the Twin Cities in Walz’s state of Minnesota. It does not end there, either, because the organization that runs that secret police station is actually “tied to a group called Minnesota Global, which is a Tim Walz organization,” Schweizer added.
“Now Tim Walz in 2020 and since 2020 has talked ad nauseam about the abuse by the police, the Twin Cities police, the local Minneapolis Police, about their terrible behavior with regards to how they arrest people,” Schweizer said.
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“I have not found one criticism that Tim Walz has had of this Chinese secret police station that’s operating in the Twin Cities. So again, you have to wonder, why is there this disconnect?” he asked. “Why are you so critical and brutal on your own country, but you won’t do a scintilla of the same thing as it regards to China?”
“You just have to wonder why the governor is not doing anything about it, why he hasn’t called them out, why he hasn’t said stop doing this, because they’re harassing people in his state,” Schweizer said.
It seems House Oversight Republicans are hoping to get to the bottom of it.