House Oversight Chair James Comer has launched an investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, his second probe into Donald Trump’s opposition in less than a week.
Comer alleged that Walz has a “longstanding cozy relationship with China” and has connections to the Chinese Communist Party, according to a press release published by the committee on Friday.
“Mr. Walz has visited China dozens of 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,” Comer said. “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. The American people deserve to fully understand how deep Governor Walz’s relationship with China goes.”
In a letter to FBI head Christopher Wray, Comer wrote that he was investigating Walz as part of a government-wide probe into the CCP’s “political warfare operations against America.” Comer claimed that Walz has “problematic engagement with concerning entities and individuals.”
But Comer only listed one: Consul General Zhao Jian, a Chinese diplomat, lower-ranking than an ambassador, who works across nine Midwestern states—including Minnesota. Comer said Zhao and Walz only met once.
Comer requested that the FBI turn over all of its documents on “any Chinese entity or individual with whom Mr. Walz may have engaged or partnered,” as well as any guidance the FBI may have given Walz about engaging with China.
Walz is said to have traveled to China an estimated 30 times, and set up a program to take high school students on educational trips there in the 1990s and 2000s.
As a member of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, Walz was able to use his firsthand knowledge of China to wield well-informed criticisms of China’s government and its reported human rights abuses, according to The New York Times .
Walz was also credited with being one of the only Democrats to support the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which required the U.S. to sanction officials who committed human rights abuses in Hong Kong, keeping it alive until it was eventually passed.
This isn’t even the first time this week that Comer has gone after one of Trump’s opponents. Comer launched a probe into Vice President Kamala Harris’s involvement with work on the U.S. southern border on Monday. He previously attempted a similar gambit by spearheading an investigation into the Biden family—which crumbled, having not produced any evidence of the president, or his family’s, supposed wrongdoings.
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