Wednesday, September 14, 2022

John Kirby Leaves Our National Security in Shambles With Response to China Threat


Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

China has been been making all kinds of moves against us and it’s as if the Biden team is asleep in their response.

Everything from the pandemic to spying, they don’t seem to care about holding China to account. Of course, that makes many wonder — justifiably — about just how compromised Joe Biden might be because of the business dealings that he and his family have had with China.

A reporter asked John Kirby — the Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council in the White House — about China buying up U.S. real estate around military installations. The reporter asked if this was “on the administration’s radar”?

Kirby’s response was so stultifyingly bad, that it almost surpassed belief.

“I’m not the right person to ask about home ownership,” he said. He claimed it was a “little out of his swim lane.” His “swim lane” is supposed to be national security. Either he was trying to deflect or he’s so stupid as to not understand the importance of what was being asked. Either way, it’s shameful and a huge problem. How can they be this ridiculous? The answer is that he’s not that stupid. He’s ducking the question and all of us should be asking why. Perhaps I shouldn’t ask that — it is the Biden Administration, after all — the folks that play down any concerns about threats from China, the same Administration whose FBI allegedly was biased against investigations into Hunter Biden and his dirty deals. They don’t want to answer the questions because then we might discover all the problems.

This is who we have in charge, supposedly looking out for our national security? Yikes.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about some of what is going on — not just that they’re buying land near military installations, but they’re also buying up farmland and foods companies that could come back to haunt us if they were able to have control over food products.

U.S. Department of Agriculture data show that Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland leapt more than 20-fold in a decade, from $81 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2020. Beijing hasn’t outlined a strategy, but large-scale state backing for these investments indicates there is one. In 2013 the government-owned Bank of China loaned $4 billion to Hong Kong-headquartered WH Group, the world’s largest pork producer, to buy Virginia’s Smithfield Foods. WH now controls much of the U.S. pork supply and revenue because of the deal. […]

Then there’s the problem of complex corporate structures that help Chinese investors obscure ownership and evade scrutiny. One Chinese billionaire, Sun Guangxin, invested an estimated $110 million in Texas farmland. He planned to build a wind-turbine farm on a 15,000-acre Val Verde County parcel that would give him access to the Texas electricity grid. There isn’t much in Val Verde County besides Laughlin Air Force Base. In 2020 then-Rep. Will Hurd wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle urging the federal government to halt the project on national-security grounds. Mr. Sun’s company, GH America, received $163,513 in Paycheck Protection Program loans during the pandemic.

Yet, we get this bad answer from Kirby, with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre interjecting at the end to deflect and tell everyone it was time to move on. They’ve left our national security in shambles with their actions.