FEINSTEIN
HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS
THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS
AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT
OUT THERE!
IN THE
November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And
so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior
of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own
ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an
incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red
China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
Senator
Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President
Win
McNamee/Getty Images
9 Oct 20192,419
5:44
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to
China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice
President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings
with the communist regime.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a
former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her
endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have
witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures
in Congress.
I’ve worked closely with Vice
President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his
statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in
Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard
working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s
presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business
dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s
endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not
investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private
equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President
Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest
RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding
BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior
contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political
Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter
Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of
the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has
been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China
with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president
was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South
China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March
2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight,
however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter
Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
In December of 2013, Vice President
Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a
visit to Beijing, China. To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have
just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They
basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese
approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly
controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden
is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely
criticized on that trip for going soft on China. For basically not challenging
them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested
heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of
June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR,
sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund
estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of
politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the
Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the
senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San
Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the
newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by
establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and
Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in
which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the
country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein
and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In
1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later
ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated
several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those
firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum
reportedly had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by
Shanghai Pacific Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the
Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same
time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to
colleagues, even once claiming “that in my
last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as
being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent
most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband
having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator
as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry
of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather
information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices.
Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already
been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a
liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed
against him,” Politico reported in 2018,
speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and
not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of
the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement
also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a
fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the
Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president.
Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since
her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the
Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the
notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is
that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California,
having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address
any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the
senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how
his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”
Analysis: Trump gained little ground this year in China trade war
A year of threatening to escalate a trade war with China aggressively has brought the Trump administration only marginal progress in securing a deal that would get China to change predatory policies like forced technology transfers and intellectual property theft.
While President Trump has raised tariffs, overall, he has held back on the most punitive measures. Beijing has taken note of this, says Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. China has decided to try to wait Trump out.
“On intellectual property theft and coercion and other ways in which it is a predator, China will stall and see if there’s any punishment after the election,” Scissors said. “If China hasn’t stopped stealing intellectual property and subsidizing state-owned firms, in 2022 we could be right back where we started.”
Trump himself has periodically said that Beijing is deliberately stalling the negotiations. “The reason for the China pullback & attempted renegotiation of the Trade Deal is the sincere HOPE that they will be able to ‘negotiate’ with Joe Biden or one of the very weak Democrats, and thereby continue to ripoff the United States (($500 Billion a year)) for years to come," Trump tweeted in May.
At the beginning of 2019, the Trump administration put 25% tariffs on $50 billion worth of goods and 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. Beijing responded with tariffs between 5% and 25% on $110 billion worth of U.S. goods.
By the end of the year, the administration had tariffs of 25% on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods and 7.5% tariffs on another $120 billion worth of goods. Beijing had tariffs of up to 25% on $185 billion worth of U.S. goods. The recent cool-down in Trump’s trade war with Beijing has mostly only prevented additional tariffs.
Throughout the negotiations with China, the Trump administration periodically set deadlines and then adjusted them in reaction to apparent or claimed progress in talks with Beijing. The White House was scheduled to impose 25% tariffs on $200 billion worth of goods, up from 10%, at the beginning of the year, but first postponed them to the beginning of March and then put them on hold — seemingly indefinitely. The White House then revived that threat on May 5 and followed through five days later.
A subsequent threat to impose 25% tariffs on $300 billion worth of goods was averted days before a June 30 deadline. A later vow to raise tariffs on the same $300 billion worth of goods went into effect on Sept. 1, but tariffs on $156 billion of those items were delayed until Dec. 15. Three days before that deadline, the White House reached a deal with Beijing where it agreed again to hold off on the new tariffs and also cut existing tariffs on Chinese goods, according to the Wall Street Journal. In exchange, Beijing will reportedly increase purchases of up to $50 billion of U.S. farm goods.
The main win for the White House from this effort has been completing in mid-December “phase one” of a deal with Beijing first announced in October, and that has one, possibly two, more phases left. The White House completed the first phase largely by moving the most contentious issues to the later phases.
"President Trump has focused on concluding a Phase One agreement that achieves meaningful, fully-enforceable structural changes and begins rebalancing the U.S.-China trade relationship," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a Dec. 12 statement. "This unprecedented agreement accomplishes those very significant goals and would not have been possible without the President’s strong leadership.”
Trade policy experts say the White House hasn’t released the full details of the first phase. “It is unlikely China made any major changes to its intellectual property and investment policies as the Trump administration wanted,” said Bryan Riley, trade policy expert with the National Taxpayers Union.
Gary Hufbauer, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, predicted that both sides will ease back on tariffs next year to prevent harming their economies, but the fight over technology policies will ratchet up. “The next president, Trump or his successor, will continue to wrestle with China for his/her entire term in the White House,” Hufbauer said.
There’s little indication that all of this has gotten the U.S. any closer to a deal, said Simon Lester, trade policy expert with the free-market Cato Institute. “On non-trade issues — human rights, Hong Kong, territorial expansion — China is probably pretty happy with the Trump administration, so they may see the tariff wars as something that is worth putting up with,” Lester said.
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