China
June 6, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The AP reports on the the Shangri-La Dialogue, “an annual forum bringing together top defense officials, diplomats and leaders.” Secretary of Defense Austin attended, as did General Li Shangfu, China’s State Councilor and Minister of National Defense. I gather he is is Austin’s Chinese counterpart. Despite the “dialogue” advertised in Shangri-La, Li Shangfu let China’s Navy do the talking in the Taiwan Strait over the weekend of the conference (the
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May 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I called Peter Schweizer this past Wednesday to ask for help in understanding the Chinese connection to the Biden family business. Peter cited his most recent book, Red-Handed, published last year by Harper Collins. Peter also pointed me to his contemporaneous New York Post column “Chinese elite have paid some $31 million to Hunter and the Bidens.” The headline is a bit misleading. For “Chinese elite” read “Chinese intelligence establishment,”
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May 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Peter Schweizer researched the Chinese Communist Party’s investment in the Biden family corruption for his best-selling book Red-Handed. He reviewed his findings in remarks to a Gatestone Institute audience in New York that Gatestone posted online last month under the heading “Does this compromise President Biden?” I called Peter yesterday to ask for his take on the 36-page bank records memo released by the House Oversight Committee yesterday. He returned
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May 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Rep. James Comer called a press conference this morning to release the House Oversight Committee’s second bank records memorandum on the Biden family business. The committee press release is posted online here. The 36-page bank records memo released today is posted here. I have posted video of the press conference below. There is a lot of information to digest here and I haven’t done so. The 50-minute press conference provides
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April 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
One has to turn to the national and international press for the news that Minneapolis may serve as the host to one of the six or seven clandestine Chinese “police stations” reportedly operating on American soil. The New York Post reports on the matter in “After FBI busts Chinese ‘police station’ in NYC, six more exposed in US” and the Daily Mail in “China may have up to six more
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April 10, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Following six hours of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke to a Politico reporter and two French journalists aboard COTAM Unité, France’s Air Force One this weekend. He discussed his concept of “strategic autonomy for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a third superpower.” Specifically, Macron said Europe’s “greatest risk” is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours,” such as a potential conflict
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April 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
RFK Jr. filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC last week. He apparently intends to challenge President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. The AP could have framed the filing with the message of good will that he intends to promote, but instead covered the filing in a relentlessly hostile story by Michelle Price. The AP story is posted here. The AP story suggests what it could to do
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April 3, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
Many Americans were horrified that President Joe Biden allowed an enormous, high-tech Chinese spy balloon to float across the U.S. mainland in February, moving slowly over strategic military installations as it went, collecting data and sending it off to Beijing in realtime, before shooting it down over the Atlantic Ocean. Administration officials assured us they were able to jam the balloon’s data collection mechanisms to block it from receiving –
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March 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
John noted President Biden’s apparent need for adult guidance when he hit the ground in Durham, North Carolina yesterday. Biden’s remarks on the ground in Durham were at least equally notable. The White House has posted the transcript here. Nick Arama has posted excerpts and accompanying video here at RedState. Biden omitted his usual tribute to chocolate chip ice cream and skipped to exploitation of the tragic murder of students
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March 18, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday Joe Biden made the mistake of listening to a question from a reporter at the White House, and briefly trying to answer. I understand that the reporter was from another country; I don’t suppose a liberal American “reporter” would be so bold as to question Slow Joe on the subject of his China connections: Two points to note. First, even in this very brief clip, Biden’s mental and physical
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March 18, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
The utter failure of the Anchorage, Alaska, meeting between top U.S. and Chinese diplomats held in March 2021 set the tone for relations going forward. Diplomacy flew out the window at the get-go and did not return. The hostility coming from the Chinese was impossible to miss. It was made immediately and abundantly clear that then-Chinese Director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi had neither
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March 4, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In January 2020 Senator Tom Cotton called for a targeted China travel ban to prevent spread of the Covid virus (letter posted here). Senator Cotton was warning that China was covering up the lethality of the disease and doing little to stop what became a global pandemic. Politico’s Burgess Everett recognized that Senator Cotton’s expression of his concerns gave him “a three-month head start” over his colleagues. In February 2020
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March 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
A highly regarded professor at Harvard Medical School writes from Cambridge: The argument that the COVID pandemic resulted from a spillover of SARS-CoV-2 from a natural reservoir has always relied on the claim that scientists don’t know enough to change previously known coronavirus sequences into SARS-CoV-2 intentionally. That is true, but it relies on the assumption that we know about all of the sequences that were being manipulated in Wuhan.
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February 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend’s big story about the probable origin of the Covid-19 virus in China’s Wuhan lab. In the related editorial this morning the Journal calls its scoop “Another turn in the Covid lab-leak story.” The editorial harks back to the April 2020 op-ed column “Coronavirus and the laboratories in Wuhan” by Senator Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton has posted the column in accessible form here. Today’s
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February 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal is out this morning with a report that the U.S. Department of Energy has issued a classified intelligence report (who knew the DoE did foreign intelligence?) based on new information that concludes COVID originated from a lab leak at China’s Wuhan virology research center: The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report
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February 24, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Washington Free Beacon reporter Alana Goodman appeared for a three-minute segment on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show this past Wednesday evening. Her appearance followed up on reporting that we noted two weeks ago in “China contributes.” The Free Beacon posted a summary of Goodman’s reporting along with video of the segment (below). This remains something like a deep secret: The University of Delaware has received $6,704,250 in donations from China
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February 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared at yesterday’s press briefing (transcript here) that they have no indication of alien involvement in the recent proliferation of “objects” over the United States and Canada. “I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity — (laughter) — with these recent takedowns,” KJP told reporters. What’s so funny ’bout
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