In a letter obtained exclusively by The Washington Post, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) is asking the Pentagon to explain why Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz posed a “clear security risk” to the United States by visiting China at least 12 times while serving in the National Guard.
Banks wrote Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday questioning the “risk of hostile foreign intelligence” facing the Minnesota governor because Walz “almost certainly” held security clearance as a senior enlisted soldier during visits to China between 1989 and 2005.
“Someone who travels to a hostile country dozens of times in a personal capacity while having access to classified information clearly poses a national security risk,” the Indiana Republican said.
“Thus, I am concerned that Governor Walz failed to comply with foreign travel reporting requirements during this visit to China, despite his obligations as a security clearance holder to protect national security,” he added.
Banks said U.S. soldiers are required to report all such trips, especially if they involve hostile countries, and are often “required to fill out a reporting questionnaire” upon returning home to document “any potentially suspicious interactions that occurred.”
Waltz, 60, Speaks ChineseI graduated from college in 1989 and first visited China while working as an American history and English instructor with the WorldTeach program in Foshan, southern China.
“No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated like that again,” he recalled in 1990. “I was given more gifts than I could take home. It was a wonderful experience.”
Three years later, Waltz returned to Beijing with his wife, Gwen, as part of an exchange program to Beijing that the couple helped set up for high school students.
The couple continued to travel a lot after that, with Waltz claiming to have personally taken around 30 trips to China.
“I’ve lived in China and, as I said, I’ve been there about 30 times,” Waltz told AgriPulse in 2016. “I don’t agree with the idea that we necessarily need to have an adversarial relationship with China. I totally disagree.”
In an interview with a former colleague at Chinese-language media outlet Initium Media, Waltz said:Like royalty” he said during his visit, and his wife revealed that he deliberately chose the date of their wedding to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“He wanted a date that he would remember forever,” Gwen Waltz said. The Guardian reportsfuture governor
Many of those trips came during his 24 years of service as a member of a field artillery regiment in the Army National Guard, where he rose through the ranks and eventually became a master sergeant.
Banks, the U.S. Navy Reserve officer who served in Afghanistan, said Waltz’s “naive” optimism made him easily exploitable by the Chinese Communist Party.
“Mr. Waltz chose to spend his honeymoon in China and, curiously, planned his wedding date to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989,” he noted to Austin, later adding that the teacher and future U.S. congressman “was not above accepting gifts, again and again.”
Banks has asked Austin to provide information by August 20 about how many times Waltz has visited China, what level of security clearance he held and for how long, whether he attended foreign intelligence briefings and whether he complied with reporting requirements.
The letter comes on the heels of attacks by former members of the Waltz Battalion and Republican lawmakers, many of whom have accused the battalion of having its “honor stolen” by abandoning its troops before they were deployed to the Iraq War.
In announcing her nomination of Walz as her running mate, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said she was proud of Walz’s past role as a “teacher and military veteran” and “dedicated to working families like his.”
Neither the Pentagon nor representatives for the Harris-Waltz campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
