On September 12, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability renewed its request to FBI Director Christopher Wray for all information, documents, and communications in the FBI’s possession related to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — affiliated entities and officials with whom Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has engaged and partnered. The third hearing on this matter was held on September 24.  During the hearing, experts detailed how the CCP has successfully waged an influence and infiltration campaign targeting critical U.S. industries and politicians.

Walz has made approximately 30 trips to the People’s Republic of China, beginning in 1993 when he was a teacher organizing trips for his students. According to reports cited by the committee, all expenses were paid by the Chinese government.

In addition, the committee found that while working in Congress, Walz helped obtain more than $2 million for the Hormel Institute in Minnesota, a research center that worked closely with the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology. Hormel’s former director, Dr. Zigang Dong, was one of Walz’s donors.

Of particular interest are Tim Walz’s financial disclosures. His family’s income has remained fairly stable, averaging about $211,000 per year over the past decade. However, from 2006 to 2010, Walz’s debt was extremely high in the midst of his campaigns, ranging from $45,000 to $115,000, according to various sources. At the same time, his trips to China did not stop; on the contrary, his interaction with Beijing was extremely intense. According to former NSA analyst John Schindler, Walz was an extremely vulnerable and “tempting” target for Chinese intelligence at the time. At the same time, some time later, Walz’s debts were closed, and at the expense of what means a big question — if indeed his income was declared from $167k to $212k per year.

Another interesting fact is Walz’s appearance with the president of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, which the State Department exposed a year later as a “Beijing-based organization whose efforts are aimed at exerting direct and malign influence on state and local leaders to advance China's global agenda.”

The FBI’s silence raises many questions. At this point, there are no facts to confirm that there is no criminal connection between Walz and the Chinese Communist Party. Trent England, executive director of Save Our States and a fellow of the Oklahoma State Public Relations Council, believes that the potential vice president may be a participant in Beijing’s coordinated operation.

One such operation by China is the creation of geopolitical and humanitarian problems in the United States. And Beijing is skillfully exploiting the instability and extremely weak border control along the U.S.-Mexico border to flood the United States with its citizens, thereby increasing the burden on national security agencies. Last year alone, 1.8 million illegal Chinese migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, and only 100,000 of them received deportation orders. This type of border crossing, without the necessary filtering measures, allows Chinese intelligence agents to easily enter the territory of the United States without providing their biometric data and freely carry out their activities.

In addition, an unguarded border is also actively exploited by smugglers who bring drugs, weapons, and people into the United States. China remains the world’s leading producer and supplier of fentanyl. And this illegal activity by Chinese citizens only benefits official Beijing in its mission to undermine domestic stability in the United States. This gives reason to believe that the Communist Party leadership will not prevent its expatriates from continuing to engage in the illegal trafficking of prohibited goods.

In this case, the question of Walz’s interaction with Chinese organizations becomes a threat to national security. The governor of Minnesota is one of the few remaining Chinese lobbyists in American politics who will not restrict the flow of migrants from the PRC to the United States. In four years, with the current state of the border, more than seven million Chinese citizens will be able to enter the United States. How many of them will be spies and smugglers that our law enforcement agencies won’t even be able to accurately track?

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.