The House Oversight Committee, led by Chairman James Comer, unveiled a “small portion” of internal communications from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday, revealing concerns raised by DHS officials regarding Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s alleged connections to China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Just the News reports that the documents were shared by a whistleblower following DHS’s failure to comply with a committee subpoena requesting intelligence records and internal communications referencing Walz and any connections to the CCP.
Chairman Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, detailed the committee’s actions in a letter to DHS, citing the agency’s noncompliance with the legal subpoena as the reason for releasing a snippet of the communications obtained through the whistleblower. Comer’s letter emphasized that the disclosed messages serve as examples of a broader concern among DHS officials regarding the potential influence of the CCP on American political figures, including Walz.
Among the released communications is an internal DHS message posted on Microsoft Teams, dated to the day when then-presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris named Walz as her running mate. In this exchange, an unnamed official warned colleagues about Walz’s long-standing ties to China and expressed concerns over how this could open avenues for CCP influence.
“Walz 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 official wrote. The message, presented in Comer’s letter, referenced intelligence suggesting that the CCP often seeks to target individuals with potential political futures in Washington, D.C.
Walz, a Democrat and the current governor of Minnesota, has faced mounting scrutiny for his longstanding relationship with China, which dates back to his tenure as an English teacher in 1989—shortly after the Chinese government’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. Walz reportedly struggled to clarify whether he was in Hong Kong during the protests, as he previously claimed.
By the early 1990s, Walz began leading regular student trips to China, even choosing the country as the honeymoon destination with his wife in 1994. The Daily Caller reported that Walz once welcomed a delegation of CCP officials to his classroom in Nebraska and has been quoted praising China’s system of collectivism, stating that “everyone is the same and everyone shares.”
The report noted that Walz’s travel history and interactions with Chinese officials align with methods often used in CCP “elite capture” strategies to build influence among rising political figures. These tactics, the committee found, have often gone unaddressed by the Biden administration, which has yet to develop a comprehensive strategy for countering CCP influence on U.S. state and local government officials.
