Pompeo: Chinese influence ops active in every state

FPI / October 25, 2021

Geostrategy-Direct

Intent on winning the information war in the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has dispatched operatives to all 50 states, targeting federal, state and local governments, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

In an Oct. 16 speech to an audience of mostly Chinese-Americans in Livermore, California, near San Francisco, Pompeo said that during his 1,000 days as secretary of state under President Donald Trump, he declassified an intelligence report that revealed how Beijing was targeting state governors in a bid to influence their policies in favor of China.

Pompeo recalled how he warned a group of some 40 U.S. governors in February 2020 that China was targeting state and local governments for both influence and money.

“I managed to get declassified a report which spoke to the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to influence governors across the United States of America,” Pompeo said. “These were deep influence operations. The document that got unclassified had a range on a table that demarcated for every governor whether they were a friend of China, a foe of China or if they were being worked on.”

Another example of nefarious Chinese activity was “the massive spy ring operating in the United States” by the communists’ spy services working from the Chinese consulate in Houston, Pompeo said.

The consulate was closed in July 2020 in response to spying that officials said was focused in large part on stealing medical and other valuable intellectual property.

“This had been known for a long time, but no administration was prepared to take action to actually shut down what the Chinese Communist Party was doing inside our country,” Pompeo said.

Under Pompeo, the State Department adopted a short-hand phrase for its new policy toward China dubbed “distrust but verify,” a play on the 1980s arms control policy toward the Soviet Union utilized by then-President Reagan, called “trust but verify.”

“Important in that statement is that we came to know that there wasn’t a single thing uttered by a Chinese communist official that has any possibility of actually being true,” Pompeo said. “We knew that they were liars. We knew that they had lied to the people of Hong Kong. We knew that they were continuing to lie to the United States about the virus which came from inside their country. And they continue to lie to this day.”

The former secretary of state also warned that the Chinese are funding the large-scale military buildup of both conventional and nuclear arms by luring U.S. state pension funds to invest in China.

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