Republican Ben Sasse of Nebraska, perhaps the U.S. Senate’s foremost expert on Chinese threats to intellectual property and cybersecurity, is rightly aghast at President Joe Biden’s decision to abandon one of the best tools against those predations.
My colleague Tom Rogan and I each wrote yesterday about Biden’s decision to halt the so-called China Initiative, which had been a successful effort to counteract Chinese economic espionage. Despite securing numerous convictions against college professors and others doing China’s bidding, Biden announced the cancellation of the program Wednesday because of what Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olson acknowledged was the “mere perception” that somehow the initiative was racist against Asians.
Sasse has long focused, hyperintensively, on these sorts of threats from China, explaining at great length in a 2019 interview with me that “China has a theory of how to weaponize our economic interdependence.” From his perches on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, he has pushed for tough action against Chinese perfidy on these fronts. So, after the administration’s decision yesterday, I reached out to Sasse for a response.
BIDEN DOJ SCUTTLES TRUMP’S CHINA CRACKDOWN
“Now is not the time to go soft on the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “The CCP poses an unparalleled security threat to the American people. That’s why the DOJ rolled out the initiative in the first place — to go after blatant CCP espionage and trade-secret theft.”
Sasse continued: “FBI Director Wray stated recently that the CCP’s actions have been ‘more brazen and more damaging than ever before.’ We need to be clear-eyed about the CCP’s unique threat and not deprioritize our efforts to counter CCP espionage. This is a priority for me and should remain one for the Department of Justice.”
Even with so much attention rightly focused on the Russian war in Ukraine, here is to hoping numerous members of Congress of both parties will push back against Biden’s foolish decision to let down our guard against the world’s other largest adversarial regime. The decision is mind-numbingly reckless. It ought to be reversed forthwith.
