In a Monday interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, news columnist and author Lee Smith said several problems in the U.S. can be traced to an “oligarchy” of American sociopolitical and business elites that have aligned themselves with China and “don’t care about the amount of damage they do to America.”
Smith said the reason “so many things look crazy . . . for instance tonight why people are coming across the border in such profound numbers, it all looks crazy until you realize there’s a reason it’s going on and the reason is because the oligarchy that runs this country now is not primarily loyal to the United States.”
Smith said in place of loyalty to America and American citizens, these “oligarchs” are instead interested in protecting their relationships with the Chinese Communist Party.
The U.S. began to warm Cold War-era ties with China in 1972 when then-President Richard Nixon visited the country. Smith noted Nixon’s visit and another critical moment in U.S.-China relations in 1994 when then-President Bill Clinton dropped plans to link trade with China to progress on its human rights record.
“You hear people say all the time ‘oh, we were hopeful that China adopt more democratic policies,'” Smith said. “It was nonsense. The premier [of China] [in 1994] was Jiang Zemin. This was the man who was catapulted to power after sending tanks to Tiananmen Square,” Smith added, referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“The American elite knew exactly what they were getting into,” Smith continued in his comments about the 1994 decision to delink trade with China to human rights progress. “What they looked at, they looked at enormous cheap labor pool and they said ‘we’re going to get rich’ and that’s precisely what happened.”
Looking forward to modern U.S.-China relations, Smith said even as President Donald Trump raised concerns about Chinese influence in the U.S. throughout his presidency, he “didn’t even have that clear a sense, outside-in, how extensive this network was.”
Smith said Chinese influence in the U.S. goes beyond entertainment and technology, and even reaches into government and the intelligence community.
“One of the most astonishing revelations was a memo that former [Director of National Intelligence] John Ratcliffe wrote, regarding the CIA, regarding their intelligence analysis. CIA management was apparently bullying analysts, saying they didn’t like their analysis of China because they were worried about the policies that might encourage, meaning Donald Trump’s policies, he was hard on China.”
Smith’s comments referenced a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) analytics ombudsman’s report released last month, which stated China analysts who “tended to disagree with the [Trump] administration’s policies” were hesitant to assess Chinese actions during the 2020 U.S. election as “undue influence or interference” saying “in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.”
“Remember who owns the cloud on which all of the CIA’s information is collected, and that’s Jeff Bezos, who is China’s number one distributor in the United States,” Smith said, referencing the Bezo’s ownership of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, which contracted with the CIA to develop its cloud data storage.
Smith concluded his remarks by reiterating concerns, raised during the 2020 election cycle, that President Joe Biden’s family has business ties with China. In December, Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden revealed he was under investigation for possible tax fraud related to his business activities, potentially including his dealings in China.
