House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., issued a subpoena to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Monday for information surfaced by a whistleblower that allegedly links Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrat vice presidential candidate, to the Chinese Communist Party.
Specifically, Comer said his committee was told of a non-classified Microsoft Teams group chat among Department of Homeland Security employees "that contains information about Governor Walz that is relevant to the Committee's investigation," Comer wrote in the accompanying letter dated Monday.
Comer said the group chat was titled "NST NFT Bi-Weekly Sync," the acronym for "Nation State Threat — National Functional Team," a committee spokesperson told the New York Post.
"The Committee has also learned that further relevant information regarding Governor Walz has been memorialized in both classified and unclassified documents in the control of DHS. The attached subpoena requires DHS to produce these documents and communications regarding Governor Walz's connections with the CCP," Comer wrote to Mayorkas.
Comer gave Mayorkas until Oct. 7 to produce the documents. The subpoena comes one day before the vice presidential debate between Walz and Republican nominee J.D. Vance.
Walz has been on the radar of House Republicans since becoming Kamala Harris' running mate over his 30 trips to China, including for his honeymoon and coordinating annual student trips there when he was a teacher at Alliance High School in Nebraska. In a letter to the FBI earlier this month, Comer said a trip in 1993 was "paid in part by the Chinese government."
Comer also surfaced Walz's time as a fellow at Macau Polytechnic University, which is aligned with China's political warfare program called the Belt and Road Initiative. Comer said in his letter to the FBI that it potentially adds up to a case of Chinese influence.
It's unclear what information Comer's committee derived from the whistleblower that compelled the subpoena, but Comer wrote to Mayorkas he wants to "understand the extent of the CCP's infiltration and influence campaign and to identify legislative reforms to combat CCP political warfare targeting prominent Americans for elite capture."
"In particular, if a state governor and major political party's nominee for Vice President of the United States has been a witting or unwitting participant in the CCP's efforts to weaken our nation, this would strongly suggest that there are alarming weaknesses in the federal government's effort to defend the United States from the CCP's political warfare that must be urgently addressed," Comer wrote.