During the Vice Presidential Debate hosted by CBS News on the night of Tuesday, October 1, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was pressed on what might be his biggest scandal, the one that has dominated headlines recently. That would be his alleged ties with officials in the Chinese Communist Party, ties that are being investigated by the House Oversight Committee.
As background, on August 16, 2024, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer opened a committee-level, congressional investigation into Gov. Walz’s alleged ties to various Chinese Communist Party officials. Comer, as part of the press surrounding the investigation, noted that Walz has visited China at least 30 times. Further, the investigation was recently expanded, with Comer subpoenaing DHS Secretary Mayorkas and demanding DHS information on Gov. Walz’s ties to the CCP.
Walz, however, has not been quiet about his connections to China during his political career. In fact, one of his many claims about his relationship with Communist China is that he was there during the infamous Tiananmen Square protests and the resulting crackdown. In fact, he said, “I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened.”
So, during the debate, Gov. Walz was asked about his ties to China. Particularly, he was pressed on his frequent trips to the communist state and whether he was actually in Hong Kong during the spring of ’89, as records show he didn’t travel to Asia until August of that year. He was asked to explain the discrepancy and had a bit of a meltdown.
Beginning, he rambled about where he grew up, as if being from a small town meant he didn’t know when he was in China. He said, “Well, and to the folks out there who didn’t get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the street lights come on, and I’m proud of that service.”
Continuing, he kept rambling about being in the National Guard, eventually getting to his trip to China. He said, “I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI Bill to become a teacher, passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of ’89 to travel to China.”
He then, bizarrely, went off track and described himself as a “knucklehead” without addressing the China trip issue, saying, “I will be the first to tell you, I have poured my heart into my community, I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that.”
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Next, using his trips to China and knowledge of the country to criticize former President Donald Trump’s tough-on-China policies, he said that, if Trump had had experiences like his, “I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about COVID, and I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing.”
Notably, Walz didn’t once address in that rambling meltdown of an answer the actual question, which was the timeline of his trip to China. So, the moderators had to press him on that question, once he was done with his rambling diatribe about the benefits of travel to China and his youth in a small town, asking him again about if he had lied about the timeline of his visit to Hong Kong.
Walz then admitted, when pressed, that he hadn’t gotten the dates right, but framed that as simply misspeaking about a small difference in dates. He said, “No, just all I said on this was I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I will just, that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest went in. And from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video