‘I’m a knucklehead at times’: Walz forced to admit ‘discrepancies’ over Tiananmen Square anecdote

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz gave a rambling answer Tuesday night during the vice presidential debate against JD Vance when asked about reports that he falsely claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China.

“All I said on this was is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that’s what I’ve said,” Walz responded to the CBS moderators. “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.”

Elsewhere during his answer, Walz said: “I’ve not been perfect and I’m a knucklehead at times,” and added that he sometimes “will talk a lot” and “get caught up in the rhetoric.”

The question about China came after multiple news outlets reported that Walz had falsely described his time in China when he was there in a teaching post.

As CNN reports, Walz has claimed multiple times he was in the region ahead of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“As a young man, I was just going to teach high school in Foshan in Guangdong, and was in Hong Kong in May of ’89,” Walz said during a 2014 hearing. “And as the events were unfolding, several of us went in. And I still remember the train station in Hong Kong.”

“I was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, when, of course, Tiananmen Square happened,” Walz claimed in a June 2019 radio interview. “And I was in China after that. It was very strange ‘cause, of course, all outside transmissions were, were blocked – Voice of America – and, of course, there was no, no phones or email or anything. So I was kind of out of touch. It took me a month to know the Berlin Wall had fallen when I was living there.”

In fact, Walz did not travel to the region until August 1989, according to contemporaneous news reports in his home state of Nebraska.

The questions over Walz’s time in China are the latest aspect of the Minnesota governor’s record to come under scrunity, after Republicans accused Walz of “stolen valor” for claims about his multi-decade record in the Army National Guard.

In August, the Harris campaign tweaked Walz’s bio on its website. The statement that Walz was a “retired command sergeant major” to changed to state that he ended his career while “rising to the rank of Command Sergeant Major,” Politico reported.

Walz served as a command sergeant major but retired as a master sergeant for benefits purposes because he hadn’t completed the required coursework, according to the Minnesota Guard.