Katie Benner sounds like an American girl next door right? Alas, a little digging below the surface reveals something rather specific about the New York Times journalist.
Ms. Katie Benner made headlines yesterday by tweeting: “Today’s #January6thSelectCommittee underscores the America’s current, essential natsec dilemma: Work to combat legitimate national security threats now entails calling a politician’s supporters enemies of the state,” the previously little-known Benner wrote.
Perhaps the purposeful avatar knocked people off the trail. Yes, the statement is jaw-dropping from a New York Times journalist who is openly calling Trump supporters “enemies of the state,” a tweet she soon deleted once the sunlight poured in.
Perhaps her NYT editors influenced the decision to delete the comments; or, well, perhaps the real people behind Ms. Benner noted she had gone a little too far – this time.
As it turns out, Ms. Benner is not quite what she appears…. not even close.
Katie Benner (pictured left) used to write freelance for the Beijing Review, China’s only National news magazine in English, published by the Chinese Communist Party-owned China International Publishing Group.
Benner joined the New York Times in 2015 after her initial work at the communist propaganda outlet. {NYT CITATION}
NEW YORK TIMES – […] “Katie Benner of Bloomberg joining The Times as a technology reporter. She’s covered Wall Street and Silicon Valley. She’s been a magazine writer and a columnist. Early in her career she wrote for Beijing Review, and since last fall, she has been based in San Francisco for Bloomberg View. (2015, link)
The CCP-controlled Beijing Review was designated by the U.S. State Department in 2020 as a “foreign mission” of China {Citation}. Emphasis mine:
STATE DEPT ARCHIVE – […] “Pursuant to authorities under the Foreign Missions Act, the State Department is issuing today a new determination that designates the U.S. operations of Yicai Global, Jiefang Daily, Xinmin Evening News, Social Sciences in China Press, Beijing Review, and Economic Daily as foreign missions. These six entities all meet the definition of a foreign mission under the Foreign Missions Act in that they are “substantially owned or effectively controlled” by a foreign government. In this case, they are effectively controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China”. (link)
So Ms. Benner was an operative, an embed, of the Chinese Communist Party propaganda machine. As the New York Times noted when they hired her: “When she lived in Beijing, she wrote about “everything from monks to music,” she says“; that point underscores that Ms. Benner was a young adult, pursuing a journalist career, living in communist China.
Departing Beijing and landing in San Francisco (fall of 2014), Katie Benner embedded into MSM via Bloomberg as a technology reporter. Then, she jumped over to the New York Times (June 2015), again focusing on the Tech sector…. and then for some unknown reason, the tech expertise was dropped, and she took on a new role reporting on U.S. Department of Justice issues. {Insert Suspicious Cat Here}….
The most recent article she wrote about, July 24th, just coincidentally happens to focus on the Joe Biden administration dropping charges against Chinese “researchers” (ie. spies) operating in the U.S. and hiding their connections to the Chinese military. Huh, go figure:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department moved this week to drop cases that it brought last year against five visiting researchers accused of hiding their ties to China’s military, prompting questions about the department’s efforts to combat Chinese national security threats. (link)
Let me go out on a short-limb here, and say Ms. Benner is likely using her contacts within the DOJ to evaluate the risk to other Chinese agents distributed throughout the United States, and then she reports that risk back to her real handlers in Beijing.
SUMMARY – Ms. Katie Benner appears to be a Chinese Communist Party operative who worked through the U.S. media system as a journalist, eventually into the New York Times, weaving her way through the organization to a place where she focuses on national security issues within the DOJ…. and then, unfortunately for her CCP handlers, Ms. Benner triggered her CCP tradecraft motivation a little too openly on Twitter and did not clear the blast zone.
