AT&T said Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s allegations that the company lobbied on behalf of a Chinese telecommunications company were “misleading.”
“We feel compelled to set the record straight on a story that ran on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Feb. 24,” the phone corporation wrote in a Wednesday statement. “The story was about the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List which governs trade activities sanctioned by the U.S. government. Unfortunately, the story that aired was misleading and failed to represent all the facts about the role AT&T plays in serving the telecommunications needs of American companies that operate around the world.”
On Wednesday night, Carlson said AT&T, the parent company of CNN, “lobbied the Department of Commerce not to levy sanctions against China Telecom, which is a large state-owned company headquartered in Beijing.” He added that the company worked to keep the Chinese corporation off the “Entity List,” which “blocks companies from selling American products and technology to certain foreign firms without first getting a license.”
“China Telecom was set to be sanctioned because of its alleged support of human rights abuses by China’s government,” he said.
“AT&T’s statement does not deny the reporting about the company’s role in opposing sanctions against a Chinese telecom company,” a Fox News spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “It acknowledges that role.”
In its statement, AT&T reiterated an earlier comment the company said it provided to Fox News ahead of the story.
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“Some of America’s largest employers are our customers and they depend on our services to communicate around the globe,” the company wrote. “In providing those services, we comply with all U.S. laws and the laws of the countries where we operate. Without a relationship with a licensed Chinese communications company, no non-Chinese provider can serve U.S. companies operating in China. In the absence of that, such support would be provided by a Chinese state-owned enterprise instead of AT&T or any other American company. We and other companies explained this to the Commerce Department and other government officials to inform their policy decision about potential unintended consequences of placing China Telecom on the entities list.”
“As a leading American company with a long history of innovation, we are proud to have one of America’s largest workforces, and of the fact that in the last five years we’ve invested more than any other public company — $125 billion – into the U.S. economy.”
Corey Stewart, the undersecretary for former President Donald Trump’s administration, joined Carlson on the segment and said China Telecom was engaging in abuses toward the country’s Uyghur population. The treatment of the minority people by the communist regime has drawn sharp scrutiny from U.S. authorities and the declaration of genocide by the Trump administration.
“It was very disturbing. We had a lot of indications, there was very good intelligence out there, that the Chinese government, through its state-owned subsidiary of China Telecom, has been using cellphone technology, telecommunications technology, to track minority populations in China, to spy on them, and then to hand this information over to the China police state,” Stewart said.
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“And they’re rounding up the Uyghur population, as well as Tibetans and other minorities, and placing these people in essentially modern-day concentration camps,” he said.
