‘Nervous’ Tim Walz under pressure amid fresh lying accusations
Adam Creighton
5–6 minutes
The Democrat vice-presidential candidate faced fresh accusations of lying amid a congressional inquiry into his allegedly close ties to the CCP just one day before his first and only scheduled debate with his opponent Republican JD Vance.
Republican congressman and chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee James Comer on Monday (Tuesday AEST) subpoenaed the department of Homeland security for records related to the second term Minnesota governor Walz after a whistle blower alleged his connections with the CCP had become “serious concern” to the department.
“Specifically, through whistle blower disclosures, the Committee has learned of a non-classified, Microsoft Teams group chat among DHS employees — titled ‘NST NFT Bi-Weekly Sync’ — that contains information about Governor Walz that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation,” Comer wrote his letter to the agency.
Those initials stand for “Nation State Threat — National Functional Teams”.
“The Committee has also learned that further relevant information regarding Governor Walz has been memorialised in both classified and unclassified documents in the control of DHS,” the chairman noted.
The fresh claims will almost certainly be used by JD Vance to attack the Democrat during Tuesday night’s debate (Wednesday AEST) to be hosted by CBS news in New York from 9pm local time, a contest that could prove critical in a still knife-edge presidential contest five weeks before polling day on November 5.
The entrance to the CBS Broadcast Centre the day before the television network will host the vice-presidential debate. Picture: Getty Images
Former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy echoed a common view among pundits that Walz was at a disadvantage going into this one and only vice presidential debate, given he will be facing off against a Yale-trained lawyer and skilled debater in the 40 year old Republican senator JD Vance.
“Republicans have the advantage and Tim Walz is nervous to debate. He should be – he has to go up against JD Vance, and defend the disastrous policies of the Harris-Walz ticket,” he posted on social media on Monday, referring to CNN reports about Walz’s state ahead of the 90 minute confrontation.
Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. Picture: Getty Images
Walz, who spent significant periods of time in China as a teacher, has played down his fondness for America’s strategic rival during the campaign, which he visited allegedly 30 times as a younger man, including a dozen between 1989 and 2005 when he was in the national guard.
Separately, reporting emerged on Monday that suggested the 60-year-old former teacher might have lied to a congressional committee in 2014, when he suggested he had been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“As the events were unfolding, several of us went in … I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.,” he said at a hearing commemorating the massacre’s 25th anniversary. Contemporaneous news reports from the time suggest the then teacher was still in Nebraska, and didn’t leave the US until at least two months after the May 1989 massacre.
MPR reports that Walz “once described being in Hong Kong in May 1989, during the student uprising that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre — an assertion that is belied by newspaper accounts at the time.â€
The campaign was unable to produce documentation to back up Walz’s…
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— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp)
September 30, 2024
This latest allegation of lying follows separate ‘stolen valour’ accusations that have dogged the former national guardsman since Kamala Harris picked him as her vice presidential running mate in August.
Since then both he and JD Vance, picked by Donald Trump a few weeks earlier, have sought to lift their national profiles and convince voters they could succeed their leaders as president.
Republicans have attacked Walz for his relatively radical policy agenda as governor of deep-blue Minnesota, including allegations he didn’t do enough to preserve law and order during the Black Lives Matter riots in Minneapolis in 2020.
Democrats have attacked Vance over his allegedly extreme “MAGA” policy views, including previous comments suggesting abortion should be more tightly restricted, and more recently for
amplifying unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants
were ‘eating pets’ in Springfield Ohio.
Protesters throw objects onto a burning car in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration over the death of George Floyd. Picture: AFP
Walz,
often described as ‘folksy’ in contrast to the more serious and intellectual Vance, appeared to have a slight edge over the Republican in polls going into the debate, enjoying a slight positive favourability rating with voters in contrast to Vance’s more significantly negative one, according FiveThirtyEight’s polling average on Monday.
The October 1 debate will be the last of the presidential campaign after Donald Trump rejected an offer from Kamala Harris’s campaign team to have a second debate following what was widely perceived to be her victory over the former president in the first debate on September 10th.
