If it weren't for Republicans holding a slim majority in the House, we'd likely never get any answers about the misadventures of the Biden-Harris administration — and the possible Harris-Walz administration. Case in point: Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has just subpoenaed the DHS and Alejandro Mayorkas for information on Tim Walz's connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This comes one day before Walz faces JD Vance in this cycle's only vice presidential debate.

Comer's committee was notified by a DHS whistleblower of a non-classified Microsoft Teams group used by DHS employees on which they allegedly bandied about information on Walz's "longstanding connection" with the CCP. The subpoena requests all "intelligence reports, documents, and communications" in DHS's possession related to that Teams discussion and any "further relevant information regarding Governor Walz" that has been "memorialized in both classified and unclassified documents in the control of DHS."

🚨BREAKING: Chairman Comer Is Subpoenaing DHS After Whistleblower Reveals Information on Governor Walz’s Ties to the CCP

According to recently received whistleblower disclosures, we’ve learned of a non-classified, Microsoft Teams group chat among DHS employees and additional… pic.twitter.com/VRuXBbf2dR

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) September 30, 2024

RedState's Jennifer Oliver O'Connell likes to call him a "Manchurian Candidate." 

Tim Walz isn't exactly shy about his connections with China, having previously bragged about being in neighboring Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989:

“As a young man I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong province and was in Hong Kong in May 1989,” he told a Congressional panel on China in 2014. Walz taught American culture and English as a second language to 1,000 high school and middle-school students each week, he said.

“As the events were unfolding, several of us went in,” he said. “I still remember the train station in Hong Kong. There was a large number of people — especially Europeans, I think — very angry that we would still go after what had happened.”

Here's how the incurious New York Times reported on the alleged incident just last month: 

Walz was in "Hong Kong, just across the Chinese border, when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests."

Walz "settled into the cocoon of daily life on a small-town campus, even as the chaos of the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than 1,100 miles away rippled across the country," reported the Times.

As with all things Tim Walz, extra scrutiny must be applied here. It turns out that Minnesota Public Radio has uncovered a discrepancy in Walz's Hong Kong claim, and Walz's own campaign team "was unable to produce documentation to back up Walz’s statement that he was there during the uprising." He might also have lied about how many times he visited China, but that surprises no one at this point. Tim Walz has a rather dubious relationship with the truth, not unlike Kamala Harris.

None of this is to say that Tim Walz hasn't cultivated a close relationship with China; he has. There's another subpoena out there seeking information from the Department of Defense about his repeated trips to China while presumably traveling under a secret U.S. government clearance.

New: @Jim_Banks sends letter to Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin questioning how @Tim_Walz, “a senior enlisted guardsman, presumably with a Secret security clearance,” travelled “to China regularly on unofficial business without raising red flags?”

Letter: pic.twitter.com/WEW5RMF9lP

— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) August 13, 2024

These subpoenas and related questions about Tim Walz's communist associations will almost certainly be brought up by JD Vance at Tuesday's vice presidential debate; Vance is unlikely to let Walz get by the issue by spouting a weird slogan and executing a twitchy leg kick.

RedState will be live blogging Tuesday's vice presidential debate. Be sure to join us!