Savannah Hulsey Pointer, FISM News
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The Department of Justice has announced that they will be ending anti-espionage programs aimed at thwarting Chinese spies at two of the nation’s leading universities.
According to a report by Just The News, Republicans challenged Attorney General Merrick Garland and his department over that decision, questioning how the Biden administration plans to fend off China’s spies in America without the program.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said in a recent speech that, while China “stands apart” as a “brazen” espionage threat, the DOJ has decided that a “broader approach” would be the most effective to confront threats from a “variety” of countries, claiming that this effort is a “strategy for countering nation-state threats.”
Republicans, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), addressed a letter to Garland questioning his decision to terminate the China Initiative. The initiative was established by the Trump administration in 2018 to preserve America’s technological edge by identifying and prosecuting those engaged in hacking and stealing trade secrets and other economic espionage for the Chinese government.
“On Feb. 23, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it was effectively ending the China Initiative and implementing a new ‘Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats,’ which will subsume the China Initiative’s work in addition to efforts related to countries such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” the lawmakers wrote Thursday.
The lawmakers’ letter noted that espionage “often occurs at American universities and government agencies which are among the most vulnerable and highly sought-after targets of the CCP because they are responsible for conducting research in emerging fields that are critical to American innovation and are often well funded by federal research dollars.”
The DOJ acted in response to pressure from Yale University and Stanford University faculty. Almost 100 Yale professors signed a letter of their own castigating the Justice Department’s program, calling it invasive, discriminatory, and targeting of “researchers of Chinese origin.”
Currently, espionage costs the United States between $200 billion-$600 billion dollars a year due to stolen intellectual property and even FBI Director Christopher Wray described threats by China inside the United States as a uniquely troubling problem in his Jan. 31 speech.
“When we tally up what we see in our investigations — over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology — there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China,” he said.
This choice by the Biden administration to back away from keeping close tabs on current and potential Chinese spies has some questioning whether it is indicative of a generally more lax and positive perspective on China compared to the Trump administration.
January of last year a fellow from the Claremont Institute published an opinion piece in Newsweek stating that “The associations between members of the Joe Biden administration and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked individuals and entities are incredibly disturbing.”
The article described the close connection between the current president and China saying, “we can surmise that the President, and the architects of his agenda, will likely be uniquely soft on China.”
A report from January of this year by The New York Post asserts that “Chinese elite have paid some $31 million to Hunter and the Bidens.” That report indicates that the five deals made by the Bidens in China, bringing the family tens of millions of dollars, were arranged by individuals with direct ties to prominent Chinese intelligence members.