#19 Peter Schweizer - China's Influence Over the United States

This week I welcome investigative journalist Peter Schweizer to the Shawn Ryan Show. Peter a six-time New York Times best selling investigator reveals what he has discovered after his latest investigation covering China's Influence over the United States in his new book "Red Handed". We cover their influence over multiple area which include Big Tech, Wall Street, US Education, and US Politicians. His book has become the #1 NYT best seller 3 weeks in a row. All of the information Peter discovered is cited with over a 1000 foot notes in his new book. You can buy his book here. https://amzn.to/3vfVCTM Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Finding suitable mental health medications can be a challenge. The GeneSight test may help. Did you know that genetics can play an important role in gaining insight on how a person may respond to various medications? Understanding this may help reduce medication trial and error. GeneSight is a genetic test that analyzes variations in DNA. It shows how genes may affect someone's metabolism or response to medications commonly prescribed to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Visit genesight.com for more information.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  China is today building massive coal plants all over the country. Just last year alone, China built more coal plants than the entire country of Australia has. So Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and the guys that founded Google decided in 2016 that in cooperation with the Chinese government, they were going to take this underwater cable and they were going to link Hong Kong with San Francisco. And they hired a Chinese...

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Tech company linked to the military to do it. And this was going on for three years. Finally, the FBI and the Justice Department said, no, no, you can't do this. Bill Gates does all kinds of things with China. He invests in companies. There's a company called BYD that's developing missile guidance technologies for the Chinese military. If Mitch McConnell were to do anything that would piss off Beijing, they could destroy the family shipping business overnight. And that's exactly the kind of leverage that Beijing wants. But these guys are doing, you know, big favors for the Chinese military, the Chinese

• 2:52Speaker 04

  intelligence service with their dollars, and they don't seem to care. They're smart people. They know what they're doing. They know the implications of it, but they just don't seem to care.

• 3:02Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you've unveiled a ton of information on a lot of different people in your book. Who do you think is the most concerning?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  I would say right now.

• 3:22Shawn Ryan?

  I want to take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon. Patron support is what makes this show possible and gives me the ability to bring these one of a kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com/vigilanceelite and support The Sean Ryan Show today. Peter Schweizer, welcome to the show.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

• 3:44Shawn Ryan?

  I have been dying to get somebody with your expertise on here about China and some of the stuff that's going on in between the US and China. And then your book, Red Handed, came out, and so we reached out and we snagged you.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  And I'm here. I'm excited to be here and obviously know what you've done, and I've enjoyed the podcast. So I'm great to be part of it and excited to be here.

• 4:10Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. So I'm just gonna give you a brief introduction. You are the president of the Government Accountability University or Institute and the author of Red Handed, which is the New York Times number one bestseller as of today. I believe, right?

• 4:26Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 4:27Shawn Ryan?

  And you put over a year's worth of research into this. You have a hundred pages of footnotes, one thousand ninety-three citations of where you found all of your research. And it sounds like just about everything was open source information, which is all cited. So people can look it up themselves.

• 4:54Shawn Ryan?

  You had access to Hunter Biden's laptop and got a lot of information out of that. And you've exposed a ton of political figures and elitists in America that have ties to China, which you call the elite capture.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:15Shawn Ryan?

  So I'd kind of like to start right there. What is elite capture?

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Well, it's, I think it's a genius strategy. I mean, you have to be, give Beijing credit, right? Because elite capture, the idea is we don't want to go toe to toe with the United States, which they view as a rival and, and an enemy, frankly. Because it's got this dynamic economy. It's got a military that is second to none, superior to the Chinese military. So instead of going toe to toe with the United States, we're going to effectively decapitate the leadership. And the way we're going to decapitate the leadership is we're going to buy them off. And they call it elite capture. And what they're looking for is to build financial ties to political leaders, economic leaders, their families.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  And once that economic bond is formed, it gives them leverage over them. It gives them leverage over political leaders in the sense that they've got this money coming in now from China. They don't want to lose that money. It also gives them leverage that, you know, there may be embarrassing facts related to those financial deals that they don't want to come out. So it's it's an enormous problem. They've been doing it for years and countries like New Zealand and Australia, and they've been doing it in the United States, and I think they've been very successful. They target people from both sides of the political aisle, Republican and Democrat. And I think it is the biggest national security threat that we have right now.

• 6:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it's interesting, and I find it actually very impressive that they've been able to buy out or buy off certain individuals. You've broken this up into about four categories, it seems like, education, big tech, Wall Street, and then and then the politicals. Big tech really kind of struck me the most because it seems like that's where the majority of the money is, and it seems like it would be rather difficult to buy off some of these big tech guys. But they've done it. So could you kind of talk to us a little bit about what's going on with China investing in big tech?

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. A lot of people think, you know, Bill Gates, he's worth like $100 billion or something like that. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, how do you buy off a guy that rich? They buy him off in the financial sense, they also appeal to their ego. But there's also this kind of weird attraction that some people in Silicon Valley have to the authoritarian model of China. I quote this computer scientist from MIT in the 1970s who says that computer programmers, in a sense, can develop this god complex because they get to design, using code, they get to design their own world.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  If you look at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg designed that world exactly the way that he wanted that world to exist. And what this professor Weizenbaum warned is that it can lead tech people to have this sort of sense that they should be godlike in other areas of life as well. So part of the appeal to the big tech titans is not just money. It's also this sense that you have this Chinese government and they'll use words like it's very efficient, right? Or they get things done, or they're very responsive to things. Well, you know, if you don't have to worry about a legislature, if you don't have to worry about an independent judicial system, of course you can be that way.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  So it's kind of a combination of motives, but it's pretty straightforward. You know, Bill Gates, the guys that founded Google, are essentially told if you want access to the Chinese market, which is of course the biggest market in the world by far, you have to play by a certain set of rules that we set up. And once they have them hooked, once they have them, they then use that to pressure these tech titans to give them things that they want. So Bill Gates, for example, Microsoft, going back to the 90s, wanted to get into China. The Chinese government said, yeah, you know, we'll buy your computer software, we'll buy

• 9:28Speaker 04

  those things, but you have to first of all, you know, create engineering jobs, move engineering jobs out of the Pacific Northwest and set them up in China. And they agreed. So 3,000 jobs, engineering jobs, went from the United States to China. That was part of the package deal. And then today, Bill Gates does all kinds of things with China. He invests in companies. There's a company called BYD that's developing missile guidance technologies for the Chinese military. He was involved in a Chinese venture to build small nuclear reactors that could have applications for submarines, aircraft carriers, all kinds of things.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  That was eventually stopped under the Trump administration by the Justice Department on national security grounds. But, but these guys are doing, you know, big favors for the Chinese military, the Chinese intelligence service with their dollars, and they don't seem to care. They're smart people, they know what they're doing, they know the implications of it, but they just don't seem to care.

• 10:32Shawn Ryan?

  So that you think they do know exactly what they're doing? And I just want to reiterate. Bill Gates is helping the Chinese with their nuclear program.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 10:42Shawn Ryan?

  That's a problem.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  Yes, that's, you're a very understated man, I can tell.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it is a problem. And, and you know, I'll, I'll give you this example to me, uh, which demonstrates how they know what they're doing. So Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and, and the guys that founded Google, uh, decided in 2016 that in cooperation with the Chinese government, they were going to take this underwater cable and they were going to link Hong Kong with San Francisco and they hired a Chinese, uh, tech company linked to the military to do it. Uh, and this was going on for three years. Finally, the FBI and the Justice Department said, "No, no, you can't do this. This will create," in their words, "an unprecedented opportunity"

• 11:32Speaker 04

  "for the Chinese intelligence services to spy on Americans." Now, I'm gonna go on a limb here, Sean, and assume that Mark Zuckerberg probably knows a little bit more about technology than guys working at the FBI. If they knew the implications of this, which seem obvious, I think, to anybody, certainly Mark Zuckerberg and the guys that founded Google knew, they just didn't care. Or they, they, they explain away in their mind that China's not really a threat, which I don't know how you do that.

• 12:04Shawn Ryan?

  It seems like all these big tech guys favor the Chinese and I've heard you've mentioned before that the Google, the leadership of Google has turned down working with US intelligence agencies. However, they have, they seem to have no problem working with Chinese intelligence agencies.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's remarkable. There was a petition drive within Google that got a lot of signatures to say, "We don't want to do any Pentagon work. We don't want to work with the US military." Uh, but at the same time, uh, they are involved in sponsoring research in China at two research laboratories into artificial intelligence and, and obviously AI has massive application to the military. Both of the labs, so this is Google financing research labs in China that are known to be linked to the Chinese military. So they are in effect subsidizing China's race in artificial intelligence against us.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  But at the same time, Google employees say, we don't want to work with the Pentagon. We find that morally repugnant. It's remarkable and it's frightening. And it's unfortunately not just unique to Google or to Bill Gates. That seems to be a widespread attitude among a lot of people in the tech world. And for the life of me, I can't explain what they must be thinking.

• 13:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, President of China has said that the winner of the race of artificial intelligence will lead to the new superpower of the world. And all these tech companies are helping China. What is Elon Musk doing?

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Well, it's a great question. And you're exactly right. President Xi of China says whoever wins the race in artificial intelligence will seize the commanding heights, as he says, of the tech war, which is how he defines the competition with the United States. So it's really important for China. Elon Musk, honestly, when I found this, I was kind of disappointed. I like Elon Musk. He's an interesting guy with interesting ideas. He's obviously very smart. Built Tesla in the United States and actually was pretty critical of China for a while on Twitter about their tariffs, on US imports into their country. He was critical of them on censorship issues. And then something happened.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  And what happened was the Chinese government said, hey, we'll build you a factory and we'll create it quickly. We'll build it in less than a year and we'll let you produce massive amounts of Tesla cars. And Elon Musk said, I'm on board. So this is all financed with the help of the Chinese government. And so you have this situation now where if you look at when Tesla talks about, you know, to shareholders where the future of the company is, where the growth is coming from, why the projected, you know, sales is going to go like this is because of China. It's not because of the United States. And the problem is, Sean, that Elon Musk is involved, obviously, with Tesla.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  He also created SpaceX, you know, the company that launches spy and military satellites. They share common software.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  They share common personnel, engineering personnel. And what's already happening is now that Tesla is in China, they built them the factory. It's now manned and run by people that are loyal to the Chinese government. Uh, the fear is that that Tesla software that's also used in SpaceX will of course be in Chinese hands if it's not already.

• 15:45Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow. And to, to, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's Chinese law that any, any development in, in the space, in, in the business, Chinese military has a hundred percent access to.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they call it a, a civilian military fusion. And so what it means is, let's say you and I, you know, move to Beijing. Not gonna happen, but let's say it does. Unless you got plans, I don't know about.

• 16:14Shawn Ryan?

  I think I'm right, good, I'm good here in Tennessee.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Um, but if we went to Beijing and we said, you know, we want to create a, a company that, uh, makes software related, related to library books or, you know, whatever. Um, if that technology is new and unique and has a military application, we are required by law. We'll be thrown in jail in China if we do not share that with the government. Um, that's something that President Xi instituted when he came in. So that's exactly right. Anything that's developed there, any of this artificial intelligence research that's being sponsored by US tech companies in China, you can bet is being applied to the military because that's the requirement by law.

• 16:58Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into Mark Zuckerberg.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:01Shawn Ryan?

  That's a deep subject. So we know that he had the chief propagandist, according to your book, to his headquarters in his office. Can you tell us about what's going on there?

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this, you know, I, I've known in my life, you probably have too. We've known suckups, right? People that are sucking up to the teacher, whatever at school. This to me is sort of in a category by itself, uh, because Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world. And the chief propagandist of the Chinese Communist Party, who's got to be a hack if you have that job, shows up, uh, for a visit and Zuckerberg takes him around, uh, Facebook headquarters, gives him the tour. They go back to Zuckerberg's office. The propagandist sits down in Zuckerberg's chair and notices a book. Sitting on Zuckerberg's desk, and the book is familiar to this guy because he helped put it together. It's the collected speeches and works of President Xi of China.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  And the propagandist picks up the book and says to Zuckerberg, "Oh, why do you have this book?" And Zuckerberg, in what has to be the ultimate suck-up mood, says, "Yes, I'm reading this book, and I've bought copies for all the senior managers at Facebook, because I want them and I want to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics." Now, whether he believes that or not, it tells you exactly where his heart and his spirit is. And that's also demonstrated by a story that happened in 2015. Zuckerberg's wife, who's Chinese-American, was pregnant, and there at the state dinner, Barack Obama has President Xi of China in the White House.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Zuckerberg is there. And Zuckerberg goes up to President Xi and says, "My wife's about to have a child. Will you give it a Chinese name?" Which is a highly honorific thing to do. Xi himself is embarrassed by what Zuckerberg has asked and says, "Oh, no, that's too great a responsibility." But again, I mean, it shows the extent to which Zuckerberg's mind, he has to or feels the need to suck up to a guy who is a brutal dictator. I mean, let's be honest about it.

• 19:17Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that the majority of Americans even understand how dangerous propaganda is?

• 19:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 19:24Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  I don't think they do, and I think they, a lot of people, you know, you've probably experienced this and seen this firsthand overseas. I think a lot of people, when they hear the word propaganda, they think it's like some crude, ridiculous, obvious thing, you know, some truck driving around with, you know, blaring speakers. And I mean, I know that's some of it. A lot of propaganda is very sophisticated, it's very subtle, and it can be very effective because people don't know that it's propaganda.

• 19:53Shawn Ryan?

  They're slick.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:56Shawn Ryan?

  That's how they put it together.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:58Shawn Ryan?

  I think we probably should have a special on how propaganda works.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  I think that'd be a great idea. That'd be a great idea.

• 20:04Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen, have you seen anything with Amazon in China?

• 20:09Speaker 04

  There's not anything on Amazon in the book, but there's been some reporting after I finished the book that Amazon has been censoring on its platform. There's a guy named Jay Carney, who's the Vice President of Amazon. He comes from DC. He was the White House Press spokesman in the Obama administration. He's been around Washington for a while. He's now running this side of the shop at Amazon. And the reporting is that they have been censoring at the request of the Chinese government certain products and certain things that are presented on Amazon's platform, which to me is outrageous. The suggestion and the notion that you're going to allow,

• 20:52Speaker 04

  not even the American government, which I would resist, but a foreign government, a dictatorial government, to say what is going to be on your platform, all because you think it's going to affect your market share if you somehow resist what this dictator is requesting.

• 21:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Your book is creating a lot of waves in a very short amount of time. And I've, his name escapes me, but I believe I just read that one of the funders of Facebook in the beginning just came off the board after your book came out and said, I'm done.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Peter Thiel, yes. And he's been critical. I mean, I would recommend everybody go look at some of the things that Peter Thiel has said. So he was one of the founders of PayPal and Facebook. I mean, very, very successful, worth billions of dollars. And he's really called out Silicon Valley and said, why are you guys working with this brutal government? Why are you cooperating with them? Why are you enhancing their military? The problem is, Sean, he's like one voice in the wilderness. Because most of the people in the tech world, at least the big ones, seem to be all too happy to work with China and turn a blind eye to what they're doing.

• 22:06Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just curious, how long has he been calling these guys out?

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Probably for the last four or five years, when it's become really, when it's become so obvious and so extensive. There's a guy, his name escapes me right now. He was the founder of DocuSign. You know, where you can now sign documents. He's also been very outspoken about some of the things that's going on in Silicon Valley. But they're few and far between. And when you web that with Wall Street, you know, you've got two of the most successful, most prestigious, most wealthy communities in the United States. And they're all joined to the hip with Beijing in one way or the other.

• 22:49Shawn Ryan?

  How are we going to stop this with big tech? I mean, it seems like because all these companies are working with China that they quite possibly are going to win the race to artificial intelligence. How do we deal with this?

• 23:05Speaker 04

  It's a good question, Sean. I think if I use a baseball analogy, I think we're in the bottom of the seventh inning. And the problem is the, some people that are on our team are basically, to use the analogy, giving steroids to the other team, to having them hit the ball longer, pitch harder. And if we don't stop that, we're going to win. I mean, we're going to lose. They're going to win. So the first thing I think we have to do is we have to call these people out and we have to embarrass them. There's a reason that they do the things that they're doing in the way they're doing them. So you're not going to see Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates come out and give an interview publicly saying how great China is. Now, some of them, when they go to China, will do that.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  And they don't think that people over here are going to hear it. So we need to call them out because they are embarrassed and concerned that word's going to get out on what they're doing. So that's the first thing we need to do. Second thing we need to do, though, is Washington DC. We need our leaders to pass legislation to ban cooperation with Chinese military entities. Now, that of course means getting Congress on board, getting the president to approve that legislation. That's a whole separate part of the conversation we'll probably get to later. But those are the sorts of things that we need to do. And I think people need to be mindful of the decisions they're making in their lives.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  You know, if you're buying products, especially products made in China, you are helping them in their competition with us because the biggest, most successful tech firms in China are also doing military work. And the other thing I would say is look at your, the investments that you have, even if you've just got a 401k or whatever. You may not be invested in individual Chinese companies, but if you're in a developing world fund or if you're in an Asia mutual fund, chances are probably 30% of that money is in Chinese companies. And those companies are probably linked to the military. So I would say, look at your investment portfolio.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  And I think if Americans simply said, we are not going to invest in Chinese companies in their investment portfolios, that alone would start to have a dramatic effect on the Chinese economy.

• 25:27Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. I don't know if you know the answer to this, but I just thought of it. But I mean, if we make it illegal for these companies, especially tech companies, to work with Chinese military, it sounds like they, they wouldn't be able to work with China at all because China, because they have that law that anything that they discover or develop, any, anything goes straight to Chinese military. And I'm sure they could twist that.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think you're, I think you're absolutely right in that. And, you know, and people would say, well, oh, you know, is that really fair? Well, we wouldn't be doing business with China because what they have done to their economy, what they've done to their businesses and requiring them to share everything with the military. So if that's the implication of this kind of bill, that's Beijing's fault. That's not our fault.

• 26:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  And they need to, and they need to reckon with it. You know, we were told, Sean, for decades, I know you're familiar with it. I was familiar with it. We were told for decades, if we just traded with China, if we just invested in China, you know, they're going to start wearing our blue jeans, they're going to start listening to our music, they're going to become less aggressive, less bold, they'll become more like us, more free. None of that's happened. I mean, okay, they were listening to our music and they're wearing our jeans. But, you know, under Xi, they are more aggressive, more bold, stronger than ever. And they are less like us than ever because they have become more repressive than they were 20 years ago. So that grand experiment that we were sold by.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  The Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, both political parties, we were sold it by Wall Street, we were sold it by Silicon Valley. They were absolutely 1,000% wrong. Uh, the problem is, a lot of people in those communities got rich by peddling that line. Uh, and so I don't think they really care.

• 27:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. One last question on tech.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:28Shawn Ryan?

  Netflix, are they involved at all?

• 27:30Speaker 04

  I haven't seen it, but I would not be surprised that Netflix starts censoring. Uh, they haven't been able to get into the Chinese market, uh, yet, but I think they aspire to. And the problem with all of these Hollywood, uh, producers, and of course Netflix is now producing a lot of their own content, is they self censor, uh, because they know if they put something in a film that is offensive to Beijing, it's going to restrict their activities. You know, you remember, you know, I'm, I'm a child of the eighties. I think you're a little bit younger than me, but, uh, one of my favorite, uh, films when I was at high school was Red Dawn, the original.

• 28:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Original Red Dawn, you watch it now and it's kinda hokey, but, but when I was a kid, I loved it. You know, they remade Red Dawn a few years ago. I don't think it was as good. Originally, the film called for the invasion to be China, which of course would make sense, right?

• 28:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  They're a big rival. Uh, turns out, uh, the studio, I think it was Warner Brothers, said, no, no, no, no, we, we can't do that because we're trying to sell other films there. So they changed it to North Korea. So.

• 28:38Shawn Ryan?

  Are you kidding me?

• 28:39Speaker 04

  So you have this, this crazy situation where these high school kids, I think it's set in Colorado, are being invaded by North Koreans. I, not, not a real likely plausible scenario. Um.

• 28:51Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  North Koreans have trouble feeding themselves, but it shows the kind of censorship, uh, that they engage in. So I think Netflix is probably working very hard to get into China because they want to sell those subscriptions. Uh, but the only way they're going to do it is if they're censoring content to the way that Beijing wants it.

• 29:10Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that would be a huge win for China. It'd be a tremendous outlet for propaganda.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  It absolutely would.

• 29:15Shawn Ryan?

  Across the entire world.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 29:18Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, well, let's move into education.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Education is, um, I think one of those sort of sleeper areas that's less obvious. Um.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  I had a great college experience, high school experience. I know a lot of other people did. And I think the changes that you're seeing there are subtle but very real. And the college campuses, Sean, it's driven in part by the fact that a lot of Chinese money is flowing into our universities. You've got people that are connected with the Chinese regime who got very rich. They formed these massive companies like Alibaba with the help of the Chinese government. Alibaba is kind of like the Amazon of China. And what they do is they take that money and they donate it to colleges and universities in the United States. So the first impression will be, oh, that's great. Well, they're interested

• 30:12Speaker 04

  in just, you know, helping American education. But when you start to see who these people are, what their line is, the strings that they're attaching to this money, and the strings aren't always visible. It's not like twine. It's more like fishing line. You know, there's an attachment there, but you can't really see it. And then you start to see the effects that it's having in college campuses, in chilling the debate about China, in sort of putting out pro-Chinese regime propaganda. That's when you start to get really concerned and you see again the kind of brilliance, troubling brilliance of the Chinese approach.

• 30:52Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see any propaganda yet in the universities?

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, so one of the things I focus on in Red Handed in the university chapter is Yale University. There's a guy named Joe Tsai who co-founded Alibaba, fabulously successful. He's probably worth 15 to 20 billion dollars. He goes around on college campuses in California and elsewhere and talks about how great the Chinese regime is. No, no, no, you don't understand. The human rights situation is just not a problem. No, no, no, no. What's going on in Hong Kong is not really going on in Hong Kong. He's basically showing for the regime. He's also, by the way, an owner of the Brooklyn Nets NBA team. So when you see a lot of the stuff involving censorship of the NBA about China,

• 31:41Speaker 04

  that's part of where it's coming from. But Xi has given hundreds of millions of dollars to American universities, including Yale. And at Yale, he set up something called the Paul Tsai Center, named after his father, for Chinese legal studies. And I went and looked at what the Paul Tsai Center for Chinese Legal Studies is saying. And what they've been saying, as President Xi of China has been, become more oppressive, more authoritarian, throwing more people into jail than, you know, all of his recent predecessors. They're saying, oh, no, things in China are great. It's becoming a law, more law-oriented society. President Xi is really improving the way that the government works in China.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  I mean, it's ridiculous sort of stuff. The other thing that's happening is students at Yale, and I quote them in the book, talk about how Xi's money and the university's hunger for Xi's money has led to a chilling of the debate on college campus, on the Yale campus, where students don't feel like they can criticize human rights in China. There are some Tibetan students that are there that said, you can't really criticize the Chinese government because the university doesn't like it, because it's going to affect the flow of this money from China. And that's just at Yale. That's just going on on college campuses all across the country. And colleges and universities, Sean, are required to disclose by law,

• 33:11Speaker 04

  by federal law, foreign money, but they hide it. So Joe Tsai, who makes his money from Alibaba in China, that's where his business is, that's where his wealth comes from. Uh, donates it uh from an offshore island uh in in uh near the UK called Guernsey. So if you look at Yale, where their foreign donations come from, they will say their biggest foreign donor is the island of Guernsey.

• 33:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  And it's not, it's coming from China, but they they successfully skew it. I would argue what they're doing is illegal.

• 33:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Because the law is pretty clear. You need to show where the origin of it is, but they're trying to hide it, mask it, and Yale is not alone in doing this.

• 33:55Shawn Ryan?

  How long has this been going on at the universities?

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Uh, I would say probably fifteen or twenty years, but over the last four or five years, it's really ramped up because, you know, in the early two thousands, obviously, there were there were wealthy people in China linked to the regime. But there are a lot more of them now. I mean, the Chinese economy today is, you know, probably four or five times the size it was twenty years ago. Because it's had this massive growth. So you have dozens, if not hundreds, of people like Joe Tsai who can donate to universities, they're linked to the regime, they're pro regime, and they're cutting checks to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, state universities, and, you know, even University of Montana, uh, which people would think, oh, you know,

• 34:41Speaker 04

  why would China be interested there? There are Chinese uh connections at the University of Montana as well. It's everywhere.

• 34:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Do you think this is reversible?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  I I think I am optimistic enough that the American people don't like this. They don't like the fact that it's being hidden, that it's changing the debate on campus. The problem is, I don't think they're aware of it. They're not aware of it. And I always view the the public in the United States as this really uh quiet, docile, large beast that when awakened, watch out. Uh, and I think it needs to be awakened. And and I think when it's awakened, you need to start asking hard questions at these universities about the strings attached,

• 35:31Speaker 04

  forcing them to reveal what they're doing. And I think some alumni should insist that that that this money is tainted, that they don't want this money on their campus. But the first thing is people have to become aware that this is actually going on and that there's a, I would argue, nefarious purpose behind it.

• 35:48Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that they're gonna start concentrating on lower education like high schools, elementary schools, middle schools, or are they gonna stick with the universities?

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I, I think they, I think they will. They'll look for opportunities. There are these things called Confucian institutes that operate around the United States. A lot of them are in college towns and they're ostensibly there to teach young people, including high school students, how to speak Chinese, which I think is great. I think learning foreign languages is wonderful. The problem is a lot of people that have looked at these Confucian institutes see them as propaganda arms because a lot of the material and literature that they put out for people to learn to read or to learn about China is obviously very pro regime. So absolutely, I, I think they are going to look for these opportunities anywhere that they can. And it's,

• 36:40Speaker 04

  it's only gonna get worse. And my point, one of the things I talk about at the end of the book, Sean, is all of this stuff would be fine if they were allowing us to do it in China. Because I, I really believe, and I, I know you believe the same way, you know, in a competition for like the attractiveness of a way of life of a civilization, I think we win that against anybody. But the problem is, we can't do that in China. So I think with anything with China, we should insist on reciprocity, meaning you can do it here if we can do it there. And if you're not gonna let us do it in your country, we're not gonna let you do it in our country.

• 37:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Let's move into banking. So you've broken banking up into BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Bridgewater Associates, yeah.

• 37:30Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you want to start?

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Boy, it's, it's, it's what you guys would call a target-rich environment, because so many of the big firms on Wall Street have all gravitated towards China because that's where the money is, that's where the market growth is. And again, you can't fault them at one level, but the problem is, for them to enter the Chinese market, it, it requires them to not only turn a blind eye to China's threat to the United States, what China's doing to its own people, it also leads them to basically become propagandists for the Chinese government.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  So I'll, I'll, I'll pick a, one example that I found particularly galling. Bridgewater Associates, it's the biggest hedge fund in the world. So this is a really important player in the United States and it's headed by a guy named Ray Dalio, who you'll see him on, you know, the cable news, CNBC, financial networks, all the time, talking about China, talking about investing. Dalio wrote this book in 2017 called Principles, which is kind of an ironic title based on what I'm about to tell you. But it's called Principles and in that book, he talks about all the people he's met in his life and what they mean to him. And he brings up this guy named Wong Qishan, who's the, the number two guy in China, second most powerful person in China.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  And he describes Wong Qishan in just over the top glowing details, saying, "I've known this guy for a long time. He's, he's helped me unlock the secrets of the universe." I, I don't know, have you ever had anybody in your life, Sean?

• 39:07Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's, it's ridiculous stuff, but he, you know, he's helped me unlock the secrets of the universe. And he says, "This guy is, has been a remarkable force for good for decades." So I thought, okay, so who is this guy? Who's Wong Qishan? So I went online and I looked at, you know, all these sort of reputable sources. Well, it turns out Wong Qishan is President Xi's enforcer. So if a, if a guy gets thrown into jail, if a guy gets tortured, Wong Qishan's the guy that makes it happen. He's called, The Economist magazine calls him "the most feared man in China."

• 39:49Speaker 04

  So what would prompt one of the most powerful people on Wall Street, one of the richest men in the world, Ray Dalio? To say such ridiculous things about Wong Kishan. And I think it's because he wanted access to the Chinese market. And about a year after that book was published, Bridgewater Associates got the first deal of any Western banker to offer hedge fund products to the average person in China. And he continues to say wonderful things about how great China is to this day. And it's worked. So, you know, his success, I mean, he's obviously a brilliant guy financially.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  But a lot of his financial success, I would argue, comes from the fact that he has been prepared to suck up to this horrible brutal regime and say these ridiculous things about them in order to get access to their market.

• 40:50Shawn Ryan?

  Is that China's goal is to just invest in these, in the banks and Wall Street for them to just? Is it straight propaganda?

• 40:59Speaker 04

  It's propaganda. It also, of course, helps build wealth. You know, Ray Dalio is now selling products in China. That's going to make more people in China wealthy. That's going to enhance the power and wealth of the Chinese state, which then, of course, allows them to build their military and advance their technology. It's all of a piece. It's all of a packaged deal. There's a Maoist concept that still is widespread in among the Chinese leadership. It's called making the foreign serve China. And the idea was, you know, when Mao was in power, we're going to have friends overseas and we'll do them certain favors. But the key is they're going to do us a lot more favors than we're going to do them.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Do for them. And that's what they've basically done with Wall Street. So you take somebody like Blackstone, which is a big private equity firm run by Steven Schwarzman. Blackstone, when it was launched in the 1980s, one of the first investors and owners of Blackstone was a Chinese government.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Run investment bank. They bought a 9.9% stake in it. Now, why 9.9%? If they bought a 10% stake, it would have had to have been approved by federal regulators in Washington and it probably would not have passed muster. But they bought a 9.9% stake and they've been in the Blackstone business ever since. So Blackstone today invests huge amounts of money in mainland China. They've invested in a company called JD Logistics. And JD Logistics, one of the main things that they do is help the Chinese Air Force enhance their logistics capabilities for power projection throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  So you've literally got an American Wall Street investment firm helping China's Air Force expand its reach in the Asia-Pacific where of course, we've got all kinds of naval aviators and Air Force aviators who may be facing Chinese pilots in the skies. And Schwartzman's gone further. He started this program called the Schwartzman Scholars where American students and students from around the world go to study in graduate school in mainland China. But when you look at what they study, who's in charge of that program, it's run by the Chinese Communist Party.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  So American students are studying in China, taking classes in Chinese Marxism-Leninism, and it's financed by one of the wealthiest guys on Wall Street.

• 43:42Shawn Ryan?

  This is a disaster. This is so bad.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. You can't make this stuff up. And as you said at the beginning, you know, if you read this stuff and you say this can't be true, go check out the end notes because it's all sourced and we talk about the curriculum of, you know, these students, what they study, what Schwartzman is funding. It's all in the footnotes. It's all based on Chinese materials.

• 44:05Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. This is, uh, this is just so concerning. I just, it's...

• 44:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's move in, let's move into the politics.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:22Shawn Ryan?

  So, I have always wondered how politicians can become so wealthy so fast on a government paycheck. And now because of your book, I know exactly how. So, uh, I'd like to start maybe with, let's, let's start with, um,

• 44:48Shawn Ryan?

  Mitch McConnell.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Mitch McConnell, alright. The top Republican in the Senate.

• 44:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Uh, Senator from the state of Kentucky. Uh, Mitch McConnell's a, a, a very interesting figure. Um, so he married in the early 1990s, he married Elaine Chao. Um, and Elaine Chao, of course, was the Transportation Secretary in the Trump administration. She's been active in Republican circles for decades. Uh, her family, the Chao family, uh, originally from Taiwan, but her father was educated, um, in mainland China, um, with a man who would become the premier of China in the 1990s. So that's kind of the interesting backstory. And they have this shipping business called Foremost Shipping.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  And Foremost Shipping was, you know, a, a relatively small shipping company in the 1990s, but then Elaine Chao marries Mitch McConnell. And in 1993, Mitch McConnell takes a trip to Beijing with his father-in-law, where they are, uh, guests of the Chinese State Shipbuilding Corporation, which is, of course, builds ships like, you know, big tankers, but also builds a lot of military ships for the Chinese Navy. Um, this was a really important visit for Beijing because this was only four years after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. And really, no American politicians were going to China. It was just considered too toxic.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  But Mitch McConnell shows up with his father-in-law, and that begins a very lucrative relationship between the China State Shipbuilding Corporation and the McConnell-Chao family. So what's happened since 1993 is, the Chinese government has been in the business of helping the McConnell-Chao family's business grow. So today, fast forward to today, where are we?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  The foremost shipping group is a large shipbuilding company. All the ships, you know, those big massive cargo ships that, you know, right now you see parked off the coast of Los Angeles. Yeah. Waiting to get unloaded, those big massive ships. All those big ships for the McConnell Chow family business are built by the Chinese government. Wow. The financing of all of those ships are financed by Chinese state-owned banks. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ships. The crews that man those ships, you know, the people that steer the ship, upload the cargo, all of that are largely provided by the Chinese government. And a lot of the contracts they get for shipping goods around the Asia-Pacific region

• 47:23Speaker 04

  are from Chinese state-owned shipping companies. So the problem is that if Mitch McConnell were to do anything that would piss off Beijing, they could destroy the family shipping business overnight. And that's exactly the kind of leverage that Beijing wants. And so what that means is, I would argue that, that it's one of the reasons Mitch McConnell, he will say things that are critical of China, but he will not support legislation that will challenge or deal effectively with China. And this is an important thing to understand about how sophisticated Beijing is about this, Sean.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  They're not expecting people that they have this kind of relationship with to be robots, right? That would be the crude propaganda we were talking about earlier. The, the, translated from the Chinese, what they're looking for is big help with a little bad mouth. That's, that's the phraseology. And what that means is, yeah, you know, sure, go ahead and say something about the Uyghurs. That's fine. Go ahead and say something about human rights. Because, you know, you have to do that for people to see you as credible on this issue. But when it comes to the really big stuff that we care about, which is access to your technology and access to your, to your money, to capital. Don't mess with that. And that's really what Mitch McConnell has done. So he's been

• 48:50Speaker 04

  big help with a little bad mouth. I think it's one of the reasons that issues related to Chinese money in Wall Street, Chinese money in big tech, he's not going to tackle. Because if that conversation comes up, people are going to immediately point to the fact that the McConnell Chow family has this relationship. And it is the Chow family business. Mitch McConnell married into the family, and we know that at least in one case, his father-in-law gave him a gift of between five and 25 million dollars.

• 49:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  So he is a direct beneficiary of the success of that shipping business.

• 49:28Shawn Ryan?

  That's probably a small, a small little present, too.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Yes. That is a small, relative to the size of the business, absolutely.

• 49:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Dianne Feinstein, this is the one, this is the laptops at the Marine Corps. Just blowing my mind.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  When I, when I read this in, in that court case, I was absolutely stunned. So you have, you have Dianne Feinstein, who is the mayor of San Francisco, set up a sister city relationship with Shanghai when she was mayor. You know, has always considered herself somebody who really likes the Chinese people, which I think is great. I, I always think it's important for us to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people. It's like during the Cold War, it wasn't so much the Russians that are our enemies, it was the Soviet Union and the government. I think it's the same case here. But the problem is, when she went into national politics, she ran for the US Senate, became

• 50:27Speaker 04

  a senator in the early 1990s. Her husband, who has a background in investment banking, broke into the Chinese market big time. And these were all deals that were substantially helped by the Chinese government. A lot of them, if you go back and look at the business press at the time, they would say, this is an unprecedented deal. Nobody has this kind of deal. Nobody's been able to buy into a Chinese bank before her husband was able to do it. And that's sort of what happened. So we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars of deals that Dianne Feinstein's husband has done over the years, courtesy of the help of the Chinese government. And it reaches this crescendo of how bad this

• 51:11Speaker 04

  conflict is between these deals and her duties.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  In 2010, she's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. So that means she gets access to, you know, there's probably what, a couple dozen people that are policymakers in Washington that get access to the secret she has access to as chairman of that committee. She's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Her husband is partners with a, in a investor in a Chinese computer company called Legend, which ends up selling laptops to the US military. Not quite sure how they got that contract, but they did. And it turns out, the Marine Corps discovers that those laptops are bugged. So step back for a minute.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, her husband is partners in a Chinese business that is selling bugged laptops to the United States Marine Corps.

• 52:12Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know how many laptops they sold to the Marine Corps by chance?

• 52:16Speaker 04

  I think it's hundreds.

• 52:17Shawn Ryan?

  Hundreds?

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Yes, hundreds. And it was discovered, I, I, I don't know that it was terribly sophisticated in the way it was done, but I found about, out about this in the civil litigation that was going on, and a guy who ran the computer command center for the Marine Corps testified to this. And he talked about the, the fact that they got these laptops, they unpacked them, they, they, they, they started using them. And then they noticed that, you know, on, on the motherboard, I guess it is, or whatever it's called, they noticed interesting things that weren't supposed to be there. And lo and behold, they discovered what was going on and, and immediately canceled all the contracts.

• 52:56Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know how long this was, how long the Marine Corps was using these laptops?

• 53:00Speaker 04

  I think it was probably eight, eight to 12 months was how long they were using them. And this was happening in 2008, 2009. So you can only imagine the stuff that they got access to. And the bigger question to me, Sean, is how was it that the Marine Corps decided to go with a Chinese company? Uh, to, to make these laptops was the fact that the senator's husband was involved. Was that a factor? I don't know.

• 53:25Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure it was.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I mean, it, to me, that, that's outrageous that, that, that, and I know there's been a lot of more attention paid to it now, but hopefully we're not buying any computer electronic goods and using them in any governmental fashion whatsoever. And I would say, you know, American companies shouldn't be doing it either because it's, it's pretty widespread practice by China.

• 53:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm just, I just wanna say something for the audience, you know, depending on what level of access those computers were plugged into.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:56Shawn Ryan?

  It could have been low level access. It could have been extremely high level access. And once they're plugged in to that, to whichever network of access that they've been granted, they have access to everything, you know? It, it depends what level, but.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  Because it's a network, is what you're saying.

• 54:14Shawn Ryan?

  Because it's a network. So the minute that computer gets plugged in, you're in, you know? So.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:21Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what access level, uh, they were granted, but that could have, that could be.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  It, it, it could have been huge.

• 54:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  It could have been huge. And if it's, and if it's a hundred computers, let's hope it was low level access. But again, like you said, and, and you wonder, you just wonder how that decision was made.

• 54:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's insane. And her driver was recruited.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  Yes, she had a, she had a driver. She describes him as a driver. There are some people that say he had more responsibilities than that, but he certainly was a driver who the FBI said had been recruited by Chinese intelligence, uh, and went to her. Um, he was not questioned. He was not, uh, Dianne Feinstein just simply let him go, um, on the advice of the FBI, but basically said it wasn't true. No, he was a good guy. Uh, he couldn't have been a spy. You know, she has made so many ridiculous statements over the years, Sean, that that you wonder if even a spy was necessary.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  You know, she compared Tiananmen Square where, you know, 10,000 civilians were killed, tanks were running over people. I mean, it was horrific. She compared that to Kent State. You remember in the 1970, I think there were four, four students that died. I mean, not a good event, but to compare that massacre to Kent State is ludicrous. She said over the years that China in some ways more democratic than the United States, that that there's more democracy at the local level than there is in America. They don't have local elections in China unless you're a member of the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, it's it's it's an absurd statement to make. She said that that the Chinese threat is more about racism than it is about reality.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  I mean, it's just patently ridiculous stuff. And yet she was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee for, I think, four or five years. And her husband was allowed to have all these ties with China. You know, I I would go out on a limb here and say, and you would know more about this than me.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  If you were a military officer and your spouse was doing deals with the Chinese government, I would imagine you'd probably have a hard time getting a security clearance.

• 56:43Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. A real hard time. Once you're in, you're not even allowed to go there.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:50Shawn Ryan?

  With a certain with a certain level of clearance.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:53Shawn Ryan?

  And anybody that you come in contact with who is from there, you have to report.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:00Shawn Ryan?

  And run that up the chain so that they can know that, you know, that that person's clean supposedly.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  None of those were required of any of the political figures we're talking about.

• 57:09Shawn Ryan?

  Of course not.

• 57:12Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any idea how many politicians have been paid off?

• 57:18Speaker 04

  It's hard to know, you know, it's, it's, uh, I think it was Rumsfeld who said, you don't know what you don't know.

• 57:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  Um, I think it's a lot. I mean, we do know. One of the things I talk about in the book is people that leave, after they leave Congress, you know, a lot of them become lobbyists. There are at least twenty-three, uh, Republicans and Democrats, um, who are lobbying in Washington DC on behalf of not just Chinese companies, but Chinese military and intel-linked companies. Some of them are making a million dollars a year, and these are companies that, uh, uh, you know, develop the, uh, monitoring software that the Chinese state uses to, to watch people, the sort of Big Brother stuff that was written about in nineteen eighty-four.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Uh, one of the companies designed, uh, monitoring software so they can, uh, it's facial recognition, so it's not just facial recognition to who you are, but they can identify you by your ethnicity. So if you're a Uyghur, or if you're a Han Chinese, they can tell the difference and they want to know the difference. Uh, some of these are, uh, companies that do huge amounts of work with the Chinese military for spying in the United States, hacking in the United States. These are former senators and congressmen that are lobbying for these companies uh, to try to keep them out of the crosshairs, um, of, of anybody doing anything about it in Washington. So if you've got twenty-three former members that are doing it that we know of,

• 58:46Speaker 04

  uh, and you talk about Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, senior, uh, Democrat Senator, uh, you can imagine that there are absolutely a lot more.

• 58:59Shawn Ryan?

  You know, working, I did some work at CIA and I know how much goes into

• 59:07Shawn Ryan?

  recruiting an asset and getting, getting that person to flip. Sometimes that can take, that can take a long, that can take years.

• 59:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:15Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any idea on average, maybe how long it's taken to flip some of these congressmen, senators, political figures? And?

• 59:26Shawn Ryan?

  On top of that, are people going into politics right now knowing that they're going to get a paycheck from the Chinese?

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Well, we know that China works with local politicians that they feel have a future. So they want to get them early on. This is the case with Congressman Eric Swalwell from California. There was a case involving Fang Fang, who was a volunteer to his campaigns. And then, of course, it turned out that she had some very troubling links, let's say, to the Chinese state and then left the country quickly. The FBI warned Swalwell about it. That relationship began when he was a city council member in California. So they start early cultivating these relationships. These business ties, sometimes they are multi-generational.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  You know, maybe we'll talk a little bit later about. But the Bush family, I mean, the Bush family's been doing deals with China for decades, multi-generational. So they want to form alliances at a very early stage if they can. And then I think the other question of timing is whether you're talking about people that are either for sale or are they just for rent? And I guess what I mean is, some people are willing to do particular favors for China for a particular fee. Some people, I think it's more they form a bond, a financial bond, maybe even an emotional bond, and then they're prepared to do a whole series of things.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  So again, they're very smart and sophisticated about it. I know, obviously, you can't talk about it, but I know with the agency, they're very smart and sophisticated about it. But I really do feel like China has the advantage of a sort of long-term view. And that really doesn't come just from operations, it comes from their strategic perspective. They view themselves in a long-term battle with the United States and their goal is by 2049, which will be the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, that by 2049, they will have won, if not before. You know, I think we, we plan six months in advance, a year in advance.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  I know there are, there are serious thinkers at, at the Pentagon elsewhere that are thinking longer term, but at the top level, president, congressional leaders, they're thinking six months and a year down the road.

• 1:01:56Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned George Bush earlier, the Bush family, and when I heard about what's going on with the Bush family, though, I loved the Bush family.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a lot to admire there, yeah.

• 1:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and in fact, when I was 18, when that election was happening, George W., if he wouldn't have won, I would not have joined the military, I would have become SEAL. I, I really liked him, and so, let's dive into the Bush family.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, in, in the case with a lot of these people, there are things to, to admire and like, but you just wonder, kind of, what, what is the thought process? And you can't always control what family members do, right? But in the Bush family, it really began when George H.W. Bush, the father, was president of the United States. He had a brother, Prescott Bush, an older brother, who went into business in China. Didn't have a lot of background there, but he had all the right connections. His father, sorry, his brother, George H.W. Bush, had a history there. He'd been the US representative to China in the 70s. Now he's president of the United States. So he started doing deals at the highest levels in China.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  And that continued, but expanded, when George W. Bush became president in 2001. Prescott Bush got a bunch of additional deals, and then Neil Bush, George W. Bush's younger brother, got in on the act and started securing deals as well. One of them, he got a million dollars a year, Neil Bush did. From a Chinese computer company that was run by the son of the premier of China. And the problem is there's not really any evidence that Neil Bush had any background or knowledge in computers. And this is part of that strategy that Beijing has. They want to sort of cultivate these bonds.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  And at this time in the early 2000s, I mean, this is where I was too. The idea was, hey, more commerce with China, they'll become friendlier, they won't be as hostile, they won't be as aggressive. That was kind of the George W. Bush policy. That's what I thought made sense. That's what Democrats thought made sense. It obviously turned out to be completely wrong. But the problem is, is that the elements of the Bush family got very good deals in China, courtesy of the Chinese government. And we're in a position today where Neil Bush, George W. Bush's brother, is frankly, I mean, a shield for the government. There's no other way to say it. He set up the George Bush Center for the Study of U.S.-China Relations.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  It's named after his father, which I think is kind of disgraceful, given what it's doing. That entity is partly funded by Chinese united front groups, which are linked to the Chinese government. And you can find Neil Bush going on Chinese state television, saying that, you know, the human rights situation in Hong Kong's not all that bad, you know, Americans misjudge it. He was very critical of some of the policies that the Trump administration had in place to kind of counter China. He does not have an unkind thing to say about Beijing. He's also on, you know, multiple corporate boards in China. Again, it's not really clear what he's bringing to that equation, other than the fact that

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  he's a Bush family member. And again, that's the kind of thing that creates political leverage. And when you have other Bush family members now coming into the fore, it's going to, politically, it's going to present a dilemma. And Beijing's going to use that leverage that they have with Neil Bush, other members of the Bush family, to make sure that those candidates fall into line. And if those candidates don't fall into line, the family's going to pay a huge financial price. And that's unfortunately the way Beijing wants it and oftentimes gets it.

• 1:05:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they can just yank the company right out, you know, just like that.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:06:00Shawn Ryan?

  They're communist.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that's the way they operate. And you know, you think about it, it's human nature. I mean, I'm not doing deals in China and I don't have these, you know, multimillion dollar deals that I'm doing anywhere. But, you know, we all, we all get used to and familiar and comfortable with things on a personal level. And then when the threat is it's going to be taken away, it's remarkable what some people are prepared to do to keep it. And they're, they're preying on, they're preying on that human weakness. And I'm sure that, you know, again, I know you can't talk about it, but CIA, I'm sure when some things you're doing with the SEALs, I mean, you, you, you look at human weaknesses and try to use it to your advantage.

• 1:06:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. We definitely do that. Nancy Pelosi.

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Nancy Pelosi, um, this is another one that I, I probably don't agree with Nancy Pelosi a whole lot when it comes to politics. But early on in her career, she was actually very outspoken and I would say very courageous about China. There's this amazing story. She'd been in Congress, I think for two or three years. Uh, there was an official congressional delegation that went to Beijing, uh, China to meet with Chinese leaders. Relations were kind of frosty at the time because of Tiananmen Square. And Nancy Pelosi took a banner that, that criticized China for human rights and unfurled it on Tiananmen Square. That's pretty badass if you ask me. Chinese cops showed up, confiscated the thing. She kind of struggled with them a little bit.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  Uh, and that's where she was for a very long time. Uh, the problem is in the early two, uh, sorry, the late two thousands, uh, her husband and her son started looking for deals in China. Uh, her husband became a partner investor in this investment fund. Eighty percent of the money was, was deals in mainland China. Uh, he had other bu- business interests there. Uh, her son got involved with several companies that was looking for deals in China. And it really kind of pivoted um, in the two thousand eight Olympics, you know, the, the Olympics right now are going on in China. A lot of people might forget that in two thousand eight, the Summer Olympics were in Beijing. So in two thousand seven, Nancy Pelosi wanted a boycott of the Olympics.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Then her husband had ownership stakes in two limousine companies that were run by his good friend. Those limousine companies got contracts to shuttle VIPs around for the Beijing Olympics. And her position changed. She went from, "I favor a boycott of the Olympics," to, "I no longer support a boycott of the Olympics."

• 1:08:47Shawn Ryan?

  That quick?

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, that quick. And, and her posture today, I mean, she just gave a speech probably six months ago in, uh, Cambridge, England, where she said, I mean, I laugh because it's so horrifying. She said, "Yes, uh, the Beijing government is engaged in genocide. Yes, the human rights situation there is terrible, but we have larger issues that we have to deal with, so we have to get along with Beijing."

• 1:09:13Shawn Ryan?

  What are those larger issues? Did she mention?

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  You know, uh, climate change. She mentioned climate change, which, you know, again, you can debate whether that's an issue. The problem is, when you look at the posture that, that, that people that are very animated about climate change take towards China, uh, we have this Paris Agreement, right? That the Obama administration negotiated with China. When you look at that agreement, it requires nothing of China until 2030. And so China is today building massive coal plants all over the country. Just last year alone, China built more coal plants than the entire country of Australia has. Um, so it, it's bizarre to me, you know, if you want to take the position that, yeah,

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  they're committing genocide, but we were so concerned about global warming, we have to work together on this, then you ought to really take the hammer to them and require them to do something about it. What you're really doing is saying, um, "Yeah, they're committing genocide, we need to work with them on climate change," but not holding their feet to the fire on climate change. So to me, there's a lot more to it than that. And I do think that these commercial deals are influencing political figures in the things they are prepared to do with China, whether it's on climate change, human rights, or anything.

• 1:10:34Shawn Ryan?

  Is there any up and comers that we should be watching closely off the top of your head?

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  That are that are good?

• 1:10:41Shawn Ryan?

  That are coming up in politics?

• 1:10:43Speaker 04

  Yes, there's there, there are, you know, I talk in the book about there are some people on both sides of the aisle that have been good on China. Um, so we'll talk about Democrats first, for example, Joe Manchin, Senator from West Virginia, very good on China. Uh, Senator Chris Coombs of Delaware, very good on China. And actually, it's an interesting case with Coombs because he has been rock solid on every issue in China that I've seen. Hopefully, that's not going to change. Um, but he, he actually comes from a family who he's heir to the, the fortune for Gore-Tex. You know, the technology that, that makes things waterproof. Um, and they actually have some business they're doing in China.

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  So there, there are levers that can be pulled there, but Coombs has actually been very good. Senator Warner, Democrat from Virginia, has been very good on China, rock solid. On the Republican side, you could look at Ted Cruz has been very good on China. Uh, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has been very good on China. Uh, Rand Paul of Kentucky has been very good on China. Um, and I would say, uh, among the Democrats, the current leader in the Senate, not a fan on other issues, but Senator Chuck Schumer has been, actually been quite good on China. When, when Trump was, uh, pursuing policies against China that China was really pushing back on, Schumer Chuck, uh, stuck with him. Um, so you gotta give him credit.

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  So it's not all bad, you know, uh, people look at the book and they get very discouraged. There are some people in DC that are, or at least have been so far, uh, rock solid on China. We ought to, we ought to be encouraged about that.

• 1:12:23Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Have you looked into Trump at all? Does he have ties in China?

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  I have, I have looked at China. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Secret Empires. I have a chapter on the Trump family in there. Um, there are some China, China ties, uh, and I think there have definitely been efforts by China to cultivate that relationship. Uh, there were some condos that were sold in Trump Tower to China, uh, nationals, uh, who are said to be linked to so-called United Front groups. Um, we know that Ivanka Trump, um, you know, used to have a shoe line before he became president. Those shoes were made in China. The interesting question for me is, you have to be aware of the ties, but there's also

• 1:13:09Speaker 04

  the question, like I was saying with Senator Coons, there's the question of what is their posture? Has it affected them? And in the case of Trump, and in the case of Senator Coons, I haven't seen it. I mean, I think Trump as president was very good on China, very aggressive on China, and got a lot of heat from friends. Some of these Wall Street guys that I profile in the book, know Trump socially and communicate with him, and were not happy with what he was doing. But he stuck to his guns on China, and I think that is good and important, and I hope that he will continue to adopt that posture, you know, now as a private citizen.

• 1:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  Was there any backlash to his business dealings in China?

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:13:56Shawn Ryan?

  After he came out and he was so tough on him?

• 1:13:58Speaker 04

  I think most of those, he doesn't have active business in China. He was selling condos, his condos in the United States in New York.

• 1:14:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  Chinese nationals were buying them. I know that when he was first elected president, his daughter Ivanka had applied for patents in China, which had not gone through, and then he became president, and suddenly those patents were granted. But he doesn't have ongoing businesses there. You know, honestly, I think if he had had hotels there, or golf courses there, or wineries there, like he does in the United States, there's no doubt in my mind, they would have put the screws to him. So thank goodness that he didn't, and thank goodness that he had been solid on these issues during his presidency.

• 1:14:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, you've unveiled a ton of information on a lot of different people in your book. Who do you think is the most concerning?

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  I would say right now, I mean, there's a lot to be said about big tech, a lot to be said about Wall Street. I would say right now, it's it's the first family. It's the Biden family because they are the first family and also the nature of what we know about the deals that they have.

• 1:15:14Shawn Ryan?

  How long has the Biden family been in cahoots with the Chinese?

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  A good question. It really started when Joe Biden became president of the United States and you can almost look at the calendar and see when President Barack Obama appointed Joe Biden as the point person for US foreign policy towards China. That's when it all started to happen. And those events to me are connected. And that I think is important because China certainly knew that. The Biden family certainly knew that. And what happened is Hunter Biden, his son, started making trips to China, looking for business deals.

• 1:15:55Shawn Ryan?

  It's interesting. So are they using Hunter to get to Joe or to influence Joe? Do you think they're actively influencing?

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  I think they are. I think they are. And I think it happens a couple of ways. So what's what's important to note is that, you know, we got access to the Hunter Biden laptop. We got access to the Gmail account of one of his business partners, Bevan Cooney. He shared access to that account with us. So we wanted to look at all that and see, so who made these deals happen for Hunter Biden in China? Or as my kids would say, who made it rain, right? Who made it rain for the Bidens in China? And then we wanted to try to quantify it. So it started in, in, you know, 2012, 2013, we found that the Bidens

• 1:16:44Speaker 04

  got some $31 million in deals from China. There's no, to my mind, there's no discernible business activity or service that was performed. You know, they didn't, they didn't set up some banking deal for them somewhere. There's no, so you have to wonder, what's the $31 million for? But when it comes to the question of who made it rain, it's four businessmen, I name them in the book. Every single one of those businessmen has ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence. So to pick just one example, businessman named Che Fang. Hunter Biden, in the emails, calls him the super chairman. And at one point, he says, I don't believe in the lottery anymore, but I believe in the super chairman.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  Che Fang, the super chairman, sets up a $20 million private equity deal for Hunter, where he really doesn't bring anything to the table. It's a Chinese government financed investment plan. Hunter Biden's put on the board, he's given it an ownership stake. At the time Che Fang is making that deal happen, he is business partners with the Vice Minister for State Security in China.

• 1:17:55Shawn Ryan?

  Which is the Chinese version of CIA.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  Exactly, of CIA, KGB, FBI, everything, exactly, rolled into one. And this guy that he's business partners with, his responsibilities include foreign recruitment. So you already look at that, that's just one of them. The other three also all have their intel ties. Another guy that helps him with that $20 million deal, but also helps him with another $5 million cash transfer, is a guy named Mr. Zhao, he goes by Henry Zhao. At the time, he was helping Hunter Biden. He was business partners with the daughter of the former Minister of State Security, who ran the entire spy apparatus of China. So you see where this is going.

• 1:18:41Shawn Ryan?

  I just want to go back for just a second. So when you talk about he was in charge, Che Fang's business partner was in charge of foreign national recruitment.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Shawn Ryan?

  What that means is they're recruiting Americans and flipping them as Chinese spies. So they're paying Americans to spy for China.

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  Correct, that was, that was his responsibility. He was also reportedly in charge of North American intelligence operations, which means he would of course have responsibility for Washington DC, Silicon Valley, all the things that we've been talking about. So we can go through all four of those. You know, we've looked at Che Fang, business partners with the Vice Minister of State Security. Mr. Zhao, business partners with the daughter of the minister, former Minister of State Security. You look at a guy named Chairman Yi, who ran an energy company. Before he ran that energy company, he ran an organization that was wholly funded by Chinese military intelligence.

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  And he, you know, made cash transfers to Hunter Biden. So this is not just a story of, you know, trading off a family name, of cronyism, self-dealing corruption. I mean, I mean, you're more expert in this than I am. This, to me, has all the markings of an intelligence operation designed to capture the son of the then Vice President and hopefully to extend that to the family. I don't know if you share that view, but it has the markings of it to me.

• 1:20:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think it's pretty out in the open.

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  It's pretty remarkable. And so then the other question becomes,

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  so we're talking about Hunter Biden and these deals. Where does this money go? And it's hard to know. If you look at the laptop, Hunter Biden has all these LLCs, all these bank accounts, all these pass-through accounts. But we do know a couple of things. We know that 2 million of this money went to James Biden, who is Joe Biden's brother. And we also know that Hunter Biden was paying some of his father's bills while he was Vice President of the United States.

• 1:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  So that's how Hunter is getting the money to President Biden?

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  Correct. He was paying monthly bills. He was paying, his dad was having renovations done on his home. Up in Delaware, those are being paid by Hunter Biden and his business partners. We found tens of thousands of dollars, I'm sure it's more, but it's just hard deconstructing it. So, you know, what that means is that Joe Biden is a beneficiary. There's even a text message that Hunter Biden sends to, I think it's his daughter. Where his daughter's asking him for money, she's in her twenties, you know. You know, those of us that are older that have kids, you're in the situation where your kids need money. And Hunter Biden's frustrated and he says to her, well, you know, I don't have cash right now, but, you know, you know, hopefully you're not going to be in my situation.

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  I'm not going to ask you to do what Pop asked me to do, which is send you half the money that I earned.

• 1:21:56Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 1:21:57Speaker 04

  Yes, he says that in a, in a text message. Now, is that hyperbole? Is it, is he exaggerating? Maybe, I don't know. But he said it, and there is absolutely evidence that he is subsidizing his dad's lifestyle, which, by the way, raises questions about all this Chinese money. But also, to be clear, it's, it's illegal. You cannot, as, as a politician, you cannot have family members and family member businesses subsidizing your lifestyle. So there's, that's absolutely against the law, what, what they were doing. It, it reaches a crescendo, Sean, on this intelligence side in 2017,

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  when Joe Biden is now out of the Obama administration, he's a private citizen. And Hunter Biden in emails writes to the landlord of one of the places where he has office space. And he's saying, I need you to set up placards, you know, outside of the door of the suite of offices we have, because we're going to be moving various offices in there. And he wants a placard for his business, Rosemont. He wants a placard for his dad, who is now, you know, former Vice President of the United States. And he wants a placard for the Biden administration. And then he wants a placard made for this CEFC, this Chinese energy company.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  They're all going to share office space together. CEFC, the Chinese energy company, is the one run by Chairman Yi.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  Who ran this organization funded by Chinese military intelligence. So you had a situation where the former vice president of the United States, who was later going to run for president, was going to be sharing office space with an entity run by a guy linked to Chinese military intelligence. The only reason it didn't happen is that an executive from CEFC was arrested in New York on corruption and espionage charges by the FBI, convicted, and that blew up the Chinese energy company. Had that not happened, had that not happened, the Biden family, I think, would have been sharing office space with an entity linked to Chinese intelligence. That's, that's how bad it got.

• 1:24:16Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:24:19Shawn Ryan?

  Unbelievable. Let's talk about Penn U.

• 1:24:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  University of Pennsylvania, Ivy League school, like a lot of Ivy League schools gets a lot of Chinese money. What's interesting in this context is the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, when Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency, gets a visiting professorship, and they set up a, the Biden Center for International Diplomacy. So Joe Biden's going to get about $900,000 a year. A lot of his former aides are going to run the Biden Center. The Biden Center doesn't have finances separate from the University of Pennsylvania. So you can't really chart who's paying for the University of Pennsylvania. But there's some really interesting clues.

• 1:25:07Speaker 04

  And one of the clues is when the Biden Center is set up at the University of Pennsylvania, donations from China skyrocket. Some of them are anonymous. Some of them, we know the names of. Some of those are companies that are actually linked to some of the people doing business with Hunter Biden in China. And so clearly, China takes an interest in the Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. And what's interesting is when they set the Biden Center up, it's going to focus on peacemaking, problem solving, American national security, international diplomacy. Because that's one of the things Biden's been known for, for, you know, 20 something years, 30 something years,

• 1:25:52Speaker 04

  when he was in the Senate, he was in the Foreign Relations Committee, as vice president. He was involved in a lot of diplomacy. So when they set the Biden Center up, they define what they say the biggest threats to the United States are. 2017. And so I'm thinking, okay, well, this is pretty straightforward. They list the threats. The threats are Russia, climate change, and terrorism. No mention of China.

• 1:26:19Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  No mention of China. The only mention of China is there's a photo of Joe Biden shaking hands with President Xi. That's the only thing that appears on the website. So I would argue this was another avenue by which China was, in a sense, engaging in elite capture. I think through Hunter, they probably already had their claws into the Biden family. This was just another way to do it.

• 1:26:47Shawn Ryan?

  Why is everybody being so lazy? I mean, you were able to uncover all this stuff on open source, which means there's probably more, you know, but why are they, I mean, why are you the only one that's digging into this?

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  Well, there are other people that have been looking at it. I know not, I only know this fact. I don't know anything more. I know that the FBI has looked into this and is looking into this, just based on personal knowledge, I'll say that. I know none of the details, but I know they're looking at it. I know that in 2018, there was a grand jury convened in Delaware that is still meeting concerning Hunter Biden's business dealings in China. And I know in 2019, this just came out in the New York Post and a couple outlets a couple of weeks ago, that the IRS went to JP Morgan, that's the bank where Hunter Biden

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  did a lot of his finances, and subpoenaed all the financial transactions from China. So there is interest in this, but

• 1:27:55Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  The frustration for me is it's 2022. Okay, the grand jury's still meeting, but it started almost four years ago.

• 1:28:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  The IRS subpoenas were in 2019. That's almost three years ago. You know, why is it taking so long? And why is the American public so in the dark about what's going on? Because here's the thing, Sean, I'm not a lawyer. I don't think you're not a lawyer, are you?

• 1:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  I'm definitely not a lawyer.

• 1:28:22Speaker 04

  I didn't think so. I didn't, I didn't know if there was like some night school that you you had done while you were, while you were doing all this kick ass stuff that you were doing night school, law school. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't, you know, there are a lot of things that you can do that I would argue are, are, are criminal, but legal. They're only legal because of the way they write the laws. So I don't know what Hunter Biden did or didn't do that might be illegal. But this is absolutely corrupt. It may even be treasonous as far as some of the things that he did. But to, to simply say, we're going to have a grand jury look at this and muddle over these details. And we're not going to let the broader American people know

• 1:29:06Speaker 04

  what the first family's entanglements are, is ludicrous to me. And that's why I think if the Republicans retake the House in November, aside from the politics of all of it, I think we will finally have an appetite to at least subpoena some records and, and release some information publicly. And that's really where I think this stuff needs to be.

• 1:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  I hope so. I mean, they're, they are so open. I mean, I read that Hunter Biden came out and just publicly said, I, I do not need Secret Service protection outside of the United States anymore. I mean, it's, they're doing this right under our nose. And, and it's, it's just like, they don't even care. They don't have a worry that they're going to be caught. It's like, what are the, what are the American people going to do to me?

• 1:29:59Speaker 04

  It's, it's very discouraging and the, and particularly the media, you know, has been completely absent on that. And I think there's a couple of reasons. I think one is, you know, look, as, as we were saying earlier, This book took a year and a half to research. It's all publicly sourced, so people can retrace it, but it takes a lot of time. And, and a lot of news outlets don't have the resources that they once had. That, that's part of the explanation. The other part, I think, is, is, is political. I think a lot of the news outlets that do have the resources to do this kind of stuff became so focused and fixated on Trump and their dislike for Trump that they viewed that anything they might report on Biden

• 1:30:45Speaker 04

  was going to help Trump in some way. My view is like, take the politics out of this. My, my view is, report all the stuff on Trump. I mean, if you're gonna, you know, report the stuff, you know, on his taxes, on his, do it. I mean, be accurate about it, but report it. It should be out there to let the American people decide. It should be the same thing with the Bidens. It has not been the same thing with the Bidens. I first reported the, the dealings that Hunter Biden had in China back in 2018. The mainstream media outlets haven't really covered any of these stories. It has been challenged. The Bidens have admitted that he had these dealings, but the mainstream media does not report this stuff because they're so fixated on Trump and how this might help

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  or, or benefit Trump in some way. Who cares? Just put the facts out there and let the American people decide.

• 1:31:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the Afghanistan withdrawal was obviously a complete disaster. We left all the lithium there. We left, I can't, it was 80 billion worth of military equipment there, essentially left there for China. Do you think that their tie, that the Biden family's ties with China had influence over the way that we withdrew from Afghanistan?

• 1:32:02Speaker 04

  It's really hard to know why somebody does something, right? I mean, it was, I watched it on TV and it was horrific. And I'm sure you probably picked up on a lot of things visually that I wasn't even aware of. And I can't even fathom what 80 billion dollars worth of military equipment looks like.

• 1:32:20Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't matter what it looks like, but it's extremely effective because I've used a lot of it.

• 1:32:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it, but I mean, 80 billion is a lot. It's a lot of equipment. And I, I think there's some news reports now that they're, they're selling some of it on the market. Uh, you know, probably the more advanced stuff especially. I mean, it's, it's, it's very hard to know why somebody does something. You could always apply the old, you know, Roman idea, who benefits, right? When somebody does something, who benefits? Uh, and what you're getting from the Biden administration, I would argue is the phrase I used earlier, big help with a little bad mouth. Um, you know, we did this, what do they call it? Diplomatic protest of the Olympics?

• 1:33:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  We're not going to send some State Department bureaucrats, but we participated. He'll talk about how he feels bad for what's happening for the Uyghurs. Beijing doesn't care about that. They, they care about access to capital, access to technology, and they don't want the United States meddling in what is important to them. Afghanistan is a big win for China. It's a big loss for the United States. So when you ask the question of who benefits, China benefits to the detriment of the United States. I certainly think, I mean, I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. I certainly think there were huge things that could have been done differently from the beginning

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  to not only make the evacuation more effective, but to at least give the Afghan government a better fighting chance that this administration didn't do. Um, and that is a question that, that, that, you know, has to be asked and investigated. Again, it's not being dumb, but it needs to be.

• 1:34:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, we could, we could start with just a little bit of planning.

• 1:34:06Speaker 04

  A little bit of planning and I guess the, uh, a lot of people have talked to the abandonment of the airbase there. Uh, Bagram Air Base was, was apparently a, a big mistake.

• 1:34:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's this question of who benefits. And I think that's, that's the way to look at a lot of what the Biden administration is doing. Again, they're not going to be in lockstep. Every once in a while, they're going to ding China. But on the really, really big stuff, they're getting, they're giving China what they want.

• 1:34:36Shawn Ryan?

  Moving out of, moving out of the Bidens, as I said in the beginning, your book has created a wave and it's, I think it's doing exactly what you intended it to do. But let's talk about some of the things that have happened since the book has come out, and I think it's only been out for two weeks.

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:34:53Shawn Ryan?

  McCarthy.

• 1:34:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, very exciting Congressman McCarthy, who I don't know, is the Republican leader in the House, and he has said that if the Republicans retake the House in November, that he wants a congressional investigation of the Biden family's ties to China. I think that's wonderful. I think that's great. Again, I don't know Congressman McCarthy. My experience in Washington is talk is cheap. My hope is if that does happen, that they'll be serious about it, and they'll use something like the House Oversight Committee, which actually has subpoena power, which means they can actually compel people to come and testify before Congress. They can demand that financial records be turned over. And, and again, for

• 1:35:37Speaker 04

  me, this is not about the fact that it's Joe Biden, it's a fact that, that it's a Democrat. I wish that the same thing could be done as it relates to Mitch McConnell's family. Now, unfortunately, they can't really, you know, subpoena a fellow Senator, they won't. But that's the sort of investigation that needs to be done, and I think we need to begin with the Bidens because he is the Commander in Chief.

• 1:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  There's also sanctions. They're talking about sanctions against the CCP. Do you want to talk about that?

• 1:36:10Speaker 04

  I think it's a, I think it's a terrific idea. I favored it as it related to Russia. Basically, what you're saying is Chinese leaders, not just the Chinese state, but President Xi, and then there are thousands of others that are in kind of a hierarchy of the Chinese Communist Party, that we're going to sanction them and not allow them to have commercial activity in the United States. A lot of these guys own real estate here. They invest in companies, they invest in farmland, they, they own stocks on the

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  New York Stock Exchange. My view is if you are that senior ranking in the Chinese Communist Party, you view the United States as your enemy, as a hostile power. Your goal is to overtake us and pass us. Why should you benefits from the fruits of our society? If that's your attitude. So I think sanctions is a great idea. I noticed that a Chinese official tweeted back that if the United States does this to Chinese officials, they're going to do this to US officials. I think that's a great idea.

• 1:37:17Speaker 04

  Exactly. In fact, I probably shouldn't have said that publicly, but I think it's a great idea. Yes, let's make sure that their American politicians don't have commercial investments in China. Brilliant, let's do it.

• 1:37:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What can the average American do about this? So you've brought a ton of awareness. Already, the wave that you've created is, I mean, it's at least getting conversations started. But what can, what can the average American do about this?

• 1:37:50Speaker 04

  It's a great question, Sean, because a lot of people get discouraged and they feel like it's a lost cause, you know, there's nothing we can do about it. And what I would say is, you know, whatever you do first thing, don't adopt that attitude because that's what they want you to do. That's what these elites want you to do. They want you to give up because then you're not going to bother them anymore. So first thing is you can't give up. Second thing is look at what you're buying. It's very hard to buy things that are not made in China, but try to avoid it, especially try to avoid electronic products, phones, things like that. Not only for the obvious security concerns, but if you're buying those products, you are buying products from a company that is joined at the hip with a Chinese military industrial complex

• 1:38:34Speaker 04

  and you're helping them compete with us. So that's the second thing. Third thing, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but you know, look at your investments. If you've got a 401k, if you've got money in a mutual fund, an investment account, see if you're invested in Chinese companies. Now, you may not have bought individual shares in Alibaba.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  But if you own a investment fund that is Asia Pacific based, chances are thirty to forty percent, if not more of that, are in Chinese companies like Alibaba. And what you need to know is that Alibaba does massive amounts of work with the Chinese military on logistics, supply chain, et cetera. So again, if you are invested even through a mutual fund in a company, Chinese company, you are subsidizing our adversary. This is, this is the classic saying, you know, Vladimir Lenin, who said, you know, we're gonna, they're gonna sell us the rope by which we're going to hang them. This is a classic example, so make sure you're not doing that. The, the next thing I would say is call out people on your own side.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  I don't care if you're Democrat, Republican, independent. Don't just point the finger. If you're a Republican, don't just point the finger at Joe Biden, say, Joe Biden is bad. Yeah, Joe Biden is bad, but also recognize Mitch McConnell's bad too. Call out people on your own side. They play off and rely on the fact that we're so focused on this partisanship that we're not unified. As I said, there, there are good people in both parties that wanna confront China, so we need to be prepared to do that. And then the final thing I would say is just spread awareness. I mean, you're doing that, you know, you mentioned earlier to me, you want China to be a focus of some of the things you're doing.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  A lot of people are not aware of what China is doing in the United States and the fact that so many of our elites are linked to them, tied to them, and basically doing their bidding. So share awareness. I mean, sure, I'd love it if everybody went out and bought ten copies of my book, but don't. Read it, share it with somebody, or share this podcast with somebody. So people become aware. Like I said, the United States public is, to my mind, this sort of mighty animal that when it arises, watch out. The problem is sometimes it's sleeping because it hasn't gotten the nudge and it's not fully aware of what's going on around in the perimeter. And we need to make people aware of it.

• 1:41:07Speaker 04

  And I think if we do that, watch out. We are gonna be in a great place as a country and we are gonna win this race.

• 1:41:15Shawn Ryan?

  I'd like to add to that. You know, I think a major problem is misinformed people. So pick up a copy of this book, inform yourself. Spread the word and be smart with the dollar. But I just want to thank you so much for coming.

• 1:41:33Speaker 04

  This is awesome. I've enjoyed it. This is great.

• 1:41:35Shawn Ryan?

  Me too.

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  You've got a great place here. This is epic. I need something like this.

• 1:41:41Shawn Ryan?

  We'll pour you a drink afterwards.

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 1:41:44Shawn Ryan?

  But yeah, thank you so much for coming and I just wish you the best luck and I hope everybody buys your book and informs themselves about what's going on because, you know, and the media is just not going to cover it. So, and we found that out, you know, the last couple of years, it's just been getting worse and worse, but I want to wish you the best of luck and I hope to see you again soon.

• 1:42:07Speaker 04

  Thanks, Sean. It's been an honor to be here with you and I appreciate all you've done for our country.

• 1:42:11Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Cheers.

• 1:42:20Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  Finding suitable mental health medications can be a challenge. The GeneSight test may help. Did you know that genetics can play an important role in gaining insight on how a person may respond to various medications? Understanding this may help reduce medication trial and error. GeneSight is a genetic test that analyzes variations in DNA. It shows how genes may affect someone's metabolism or response to medications commonly prescribed to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Visit genesight.com for more information.