Harris vetting team asked Walz if he was ever ‘agent of China’

The vetting team for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign asked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz if he was ever “an agent of China,” CNN reported on Monday.

The report comes as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, reportedly wrote in a memoir that the Harris team asked him if he had ever “been a double agent for Israel” when it was considering him as Harris’s running mate.

Citing four anonymous sources familiar with the situation, CNN reported that Walz “was asked by her vetting team if he had ever been an agent of China, prompted by aides’ review of the multiple trips Walz took to China before running for office.”

“That was the same line of questioning, four people involved with that process say, which led to top lawyer Dana Remus asking Shapiro if he had ever been an agent of Israel,” the CNN report stated.

The four sources also told CNN that the “foreign agent” question is “standard” for vice-presidential candidates, as it is for “all high-level federal government appointees.”

One of the sources told CNN that “the crux of vetting is asking uncomfortable and even far-fetched questions, especially ones that could be raised by your opponents. ‘Have you ever had an affair?’ ‘Have you ever embezzled state funds?’ ‘Have you ever been an agent for another country?’”

“The point isn’t that you believe any of it to be true,” the CNN source said. “It’s that the subject needs to be on record with definitive answers.”

Walz reportedly answered the question with a “no,” which was the same answer that Shapiro gave to his question. Harris chose Walz as her running mate.

In his memoir, Shapiro wrote that being asked if he had been “a double agent for Israel” as “the only Jewish guy” in contention to be Harris’s running mate raised questions about the team that the former vice president had assembled.

“These sessions were completely professional and businesslike,” the governor wrote. “But I just had a knot in my stomach through all of it.”

Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, told JNS that even if other candidates were asked similar questions, asking Shapiro if he was an agent for Israel was “bizarre” and redolent of anti-Jewish stereotypes.

“Non-Jews need to understand that there’s been a trope that has been used against Jews for millennia, that is wherever Jews lived, they were accused of not being loyal to their homeland,” Halber said. “They were accused of being loyal, literally, to a country called ‘Israel’ that didn’t exist, and that trope was used for nefarious purposes that often led to violence and their deaths.”

“For Jews, the idea of being accused of any sort of disloyalty toward their own nation has tremendous historical reference and reminds us of a trope that was used for our persecution,” he told JNS.

One reason that Shapiro may have been asked about his ties to Israel was his previous employment shortly after college when he worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington for approximately six months and his time in a volunteer program in Israel as a student.

Shapiro wrote in an op-ed for the University of Rochester’s Campus Times when he was a student that he had been “a past volunteer in the Israeli army.”

It’s not clear exactly what volunteer program Shapiro participated in, but it may have been similar to Volunteers for Israel or Sar-El, a program for non-Israelis to do volunteer work alongside the Israel Defense Forces that does not involve enlistment or military duties.

A spokesman for Shapiro told JNS in August that the program in Israel included “volunteering on service projects on an Israeli army base” and that “at no time was he engaged in any military activities.”

“I think his description of saying he ‘volunteered’ in the IDF when he was 20 years old in an op-ed was youthful bravado,” Halber said. “I went on Volunteers for Israel. I was nowhere near combat. I didn’t do anything. I moved fire extinguishers and I wrapped a couple of truck parts in plastic to make sure that they were winterized.”

“That was my big experience,” he said.

Halber said that there is an enormous leap between volunteer work and a brief work experience at an embassy and the kinds of questions that Shapiro said he was asked about serving Israel.

“It was legitimate to ask Josh Shapiro a question or so about having volunteered on a program or spending six months getting paid some minimum wage at a job at the Israeli embassy. That’s fine,” Halber said. “But the language that was used, ‘are you a double agent,’ or ‘have you ever been an agent,’ that’s disgusting.”

©JNS