Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin questioned about Tim Walz’s 30 trips to China

Rep. Jim Banks is pressing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to answer questions about Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s 30 trips to China.

Mr. Banks said the trips by Mr. Walz, who spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, potentially violated foreign travel disclosure requirements for security clearance holders.

Mr. Banks, an Indiana Republican who chairs the Armed Services Committee’s military personnel panel, said there are “still many unanswered questions about Governor Walz’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.”

In a letter to Mr. Austin, the congressman asked how a senior enlisted guardsman, presumably with a Secret security clearance, traveled to China regularly on unofficial business without raising red flags.

It is unclear if Mr. Walz, who is the governor of Minnesota, accurately reported the dozens of foreign trips to his superiors, as is required for anyone with access to classified information, or if he kept them in the dark.

“Walz claimed in 2016 that he had traveled to China nearly 30 times; it is likely that at least a dozen of these trips occurred while he was a guardsman … and presumably held a clearance for much or all of this time,” Mr. Banks wrote.

“Any individual traveling dozens of times to an adversary nation in a personal capacity while having access to classified information poses an obvious security risk. An individual with a clearance should have had the good judgment not to engage in such travel in the first place.”

Mr. Banks said he is concerned Mr. Walz may have “failed to comply with foreign travel reporting requirements during these trips to China, despite his duty as a security clearance holder to protect our national security.”

He noted that Mr. Walz, a former six-term congressman from Minnesota, “chose to have his honeymoon in China and even bizarrely planned his wedding date to coincide with the 5th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.”

The Washington Times reached out to the Harris campaign for comment but did not hear back.