Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz failed to provide a clear answer on Tuesday night when confronted about false claims he has made about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, offering that he is “a knucklehead at times” and simply “misspoke.”
Walz was responding to a question during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate against Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), moderated by CBS News. The moderators challenged both candidates on their respective records, asking Walz to reply to a report that surfaced on Tuesday that Walz had falsely claimed in 2014 to have been present in Hong Kong during the communist mass killings. Walz reportedly made the comments during a congressional hearing in 2014, claiming he was in Hong Kong in May 1989. In reality, the Washington Free Beacon found evidence that Walz was in Nebraska at the time and did not travel to China until August.
Later on Tuesday, CNN found multiple other instances of Walz claiming to have been in Hong Kong on the day of the massacre — June 4, 1989. In 2009, Walz made the claim that he was in Hong Kong on that day during a congressional hearing.
Asked directly to comment on the discrepancy on Tuesday night, rather than state plainly whether he was in Hong Kong during the massacre or not, Walz offered a detailed autobiography that began with his upbringing in rural Nebraska and led to him explaining that he began to travel frequently to China in “the summer of ’89.”
“I got the opportunity in the summer of ’89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that,” he explained, “I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China.”
Walz appeared to indirectly confirm that he was not in the country during the Tiananmen Square massacre by continuing, “My community knows who I am, they saw where I was at, they – look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community, I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.”
WATCH: His Words! Tim Walz Describes Himself as a “Knucklehead” to Excuse Tiananmen Square Lie
CBS News Vice Presidential Debate
Walz went on to admit that he would “many times … talk a lot.”
“I will get caught up in the rhetoric – but being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life — I learned a lot about China,” he said, adding that former President Donald Trump would have benefitted from traveling to China with Walz.
Moderator Margaret Brennan repeated her question following his extended initial reply, requesting Walz directly address reports that he falsely claimed to be in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989.
“No, alls I said on this was I got there that summer and misspoke on this,” Walz claimed. “That’s what I’ve said, so I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests … and from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”
Contrary to his claim, CNN reported on Tuesday that Walz said in a 2019 interview: “I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened. And I was in China after that.”
The Tiananmen Square massacre was the indiscriminate killing of peaceful protesters, many of them young students, by the Chinese Communist Party in response to anti-communist protests in Beijing in 1989. The Communist Party deployed its military to crush, in some cases literally, the protesters, rolling tanks into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to destroy a march convening around a statue of the “goddess of democracy,” an image reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty that maintains significant symbolism among anti-communist movements in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
“There were tanks rolling into crowds of people at high speed, crushing them into literally hamburger,” Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher, one of the first Western scholars allowed into China, told Breitbart News Tonight in 2019, the 30th anniversary of the killings. “The streets had to be scraped afterwards with bulldozers to get off the remains of the human beings who were killed by these tanks that ran over them. The butchery was horrible.”
While no exact death toll exists for the state killings, a 2017 estimate based on documentation discovered at the time suggested the Chinese Communist Party killed at least 10,000 people.
Walz chose to marry wife Gwen on June 4, 1994, to mark the anniversary of the massacre, and honeymooned in China.
“He wanted to have a date he’ll always remember,” Gwen Walz said in an interview shortly after the wedding.
