Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz's China tourism company was reportedly dissolved by the state of Nebraska in 1998 for failing to pay a $26 business operations tax.
The Minnesota Governor's for-profit enterprise, Educational Travel Adventures, which catered to student groups wanting to travel to Communist China, was shut down by the Nebraska Secretary of State in April 1998 for “unpaid occupational taxes.” Washington Free Beacon It was reported on Monday.
The company, co-founded by Waltz and his wife, Gwen, was first registered in Nebraska in 1995.
Despite his company's bankruptcy, Waltz continued to organize student tours to China, including at least two trips to the country in 1998 and 2001, the media outlet said.
In 2002, Walz founded another group of the same name in Minnesota and promoted it during the 2006 congressional elections.
“Waltz founded a small company called Educational Travel Adventures, which runs educational trips to China every year for high school students.” Archived Press Packet A report on Walz's congressional campaign noted that the governor was part of “one of the first groups of government-certified American educators to teach in Chinese high schools.”
Waltz reportedly stopped leading student trips to China in 2003.
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In 2008, a year after he was sworn in as a congressman representing Minnesota's 1st Congressional District, Walz relaunched Educational Travel Adventures in Nebraska after paying $235 in back taxes and interest, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
After the Nebraska-based company was back on solid footing again, Waltz quickly moved to disband it.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) Expressing Concerns In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray last month, he spoke about Waltz's travel company.
Comer asked the FBI for information “about the Chinese entities and officials with which Governor Walz is associated and affiliated” and “any warnings or advice the FBI may have given to Governor Walz about American politicians being targeted or recruited in Chinese Communist Party influence operations.”
The chairman of the oversight committee also expressed concern that the Chinese Communist Party may be subsidizing some of Educational Travel Adventures' China trips.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also has other ties to China.
Until at least 2007, he lectured in international relations as a visiting scholar at the National University of Macau Science and Technology.
Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) has called on the Pentagon to investigate the relationship and report to Congress about whether Walz complied with foreign travel reporting requirements during his multiple trips to China, some of which took place while he was a senior member of the Minnesota National Guard.
Waltz also married his wife on the fifth anniversary of the end of the deadly Tiananmen Square protests, and the couple spent their honeymoon in China.
“He wanted a date that he would remember forever,” Gwen told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald in 1994.
The Harris campaign did not respond to The Washington Post's request for comment.
