#19 Peter Schweizer - China's Influence Over the United States 01:43:22

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Visit gene site dot com for more information. 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 have found in 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

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 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. 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? I would say right now... 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 slash vigilance elite and support the Sean Ryan show today. Peter Schweitzer, welcome to the show. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me. 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 U.S. and China. And then your book, Red Handed, came out. And so we reached out and we snagged you.

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. Thank you.

So I'm just going to give you a brief introduction. You are the president of the Government Accountability Institute and the author of Red Handed, which is the New York Times number one bestseller as of today, I believe, right? That's correct. And you put over a year's worth of research into this. You have 100 pages of footnotes, 1,093 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. 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. Right. So I'd kind of like to start right there. What is elite capture? Well, I think it's a genius strategy. I mean, you have to 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 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. 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 an enormous problem. They've been doing it for years in 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.

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 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? 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 them 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.

If you look at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg designed that world exactly the way that he wanted that world to exist.

And what this professor, Wiesenbaum, 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.

uh, to things. Well, you know, if you don't have to worry about a legislature, if you don't have to worry about independent judicial system, of course you can be that way. So it's kind of a combination of motives, but it's pretty straightforward. Uh, you know, Bill Gates, uh, the guys that founded Google are essentially told if you want access to the Chinese, uh, market, which is of course the biggest market in the world by far, uh,

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 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. That was eventually stopped under the Trump administration by the Justice Department on national security grounds.

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. So 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. Correct. That's a problem. So...

Yes, that's it. You're a very understated man, I can tell. Yeah, no, it is a problem. And, you know, I'll give you this example to me, which demonstrates how they know what they're doing.

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 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. This will create, in their words, an unprecedented opportunity for the Chinese intelligence services to spy on Americans. Now, I'm going to go out 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 explain away in their mind that China's not really a threat, which I don't know how you do that. It seems like all these big tech guys favor China.

the Chinese and I've heard you mentioned before that the Google, the leadership of Google has turned down working with US intelligence agencies. However,

They seem to have no problem working with Chinese intelligence agencies. Yeah, I mean, 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 U.S. military. But at the same time, they are involved in sponsoring research in China at two research laboratories into artificial intelligence and technology.

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. 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 that.

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

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 U.S. imports into their country. He was critical of them on censorship issues.

And then something happened. 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 was 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 to shareholders where the future of the company is, where the growth is coming from, why the projected 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. He also created SpaceX, right?

you know, the company that launches spy and military satellites, they share common software.

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. 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. Oh, wow. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's Chinese law that any

any development in the space, in the business, Chinese military has 100% access to. Yeah, exactly. Is that correct? Yeah, they call it civilian-military fusions.

And so what it means is, let's say you and I, you know, move to Beijing. Not going to happen, but let's say it does. Unless you got plans, I don't know about that. I think I'm right. I'm good here in Tennessee. But if we went to Beijing and we said, you know, we want to create a company that, you

makes software related to library books or whatever, 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. 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. - Let's move into Mark Zuckerberg. - Okay. - That's a deep subject. - Yes. - 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? Yeah, I mean, this, you know, I've known in my life, you probably have too, we've known suck-ups, right? People that are sucking up to the teacher, whatever at school. This, to me, is sort of in a category by itself because Zuckerberg's 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 Facebook headquarters, gives him the tour. They go back to Zuckerberg's office. The propaganda 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.

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. 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.

Do you think that the majority of Americans even understand how dangerous propaganda is? No. I don't either. I don't think they do. And I think 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 thing.

obvious thing you know some truck driving around with you know blaring speakers and i mean i know that 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 or it's that's they're slick yeah how they yeah how they put it together yeah i think we probably should have a special on how propaganda works i've got a great idea that'd be a great idea

Have you seen anything with Amazon in China?

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 D.C. He was the White House press spokesman in the Obama administration. He's been around Washington for a while. He's now running sort of 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

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. Wow. Your book is creating a lot of waves in a very short amount of time. And 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. 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? 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. I'm just curious. How long has he been calling these guys out? 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, 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'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. 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?

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 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.

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, D.C., 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. You know, if you're buying products, especially products made in China, you are buying

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 the investments that you have. Even if you 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. 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. 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 wouldn't be able to work with China at all because China

because they have that law that anything that they discover or develop, anything goes straight to Chinese military and I'm sure they could twist that. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right in that and people would say, well, oh, 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 in 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. And they need to reckon with it. 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, 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 under G, 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...

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. The problem is a lot of people in those communities got rich by peddling that line. And so I don't think they really care. Wow.

One last question on tech. Netflix, are they involved at all? I haven't seen it, but I would not be surprised that Netflix starts censoring. They haven't been able to get into the Chinese market yet, but I think they aspire to. And the problem with all of these Hollywood producers, and of course Netflix is now producing a lot of their own content, is they self-censor 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 a child of the 80s. I think you're a little bit younger than me. But one of my favorite films when I was in high school was Red Dawn, the original Red Dawn. You watch it now and it's kind of hokey. 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? They're a big rival. Turns out the studio, I think it was Warner Brothers, said, no, no, no, no, no, we can't do that because we're trying to sell other films there. So they changed it to North Korea. So,

Are you kidding me? So you have this crazy situation where these high school kids, I think it's set in Colorado, are being invaded by North Koreans. Not a real likely plausible scenario. Wow. North Koreans have trouble feeding themselves, but it shows the kind of censorship that they engage in. So I think Netflix is probably...

working very hard to get into China because they want to sell those subscriptions. But the only way they're going to do it is if they're censoring content to the way that Beijing wants it. And that would be a huge win for China. It would be a tremendous outlet for propaganda. It absolutely would. Across the entire world. Absolutely. But let's move into education. Education is, I think, one of those sort of sleeper areas that's less obvious.

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 would be, oh, that's great. Well, they're interested in just 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. 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.

Do you see any propaganda yet in the universities? 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.

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 shilling 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, that's part of where it's coming from. But Tsai 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 become more oppressive, more authoritarian, throwing more people into jail than all of his recent predecessors.

They're saying, "Oh no, things in China are great. It's becoming a more law-oriented society. President Xi is really improving the way that the government works in China." 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 size money and the university's hunger for size 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 there.

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 by federal law foreign money but they hide it so joe sai who makes his money from alibaba in china that's where his business is that's where his wealth comes from

Donates it from an offshore island 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. Oh, man.

- And it's not, it's coming from China, but they successfully skew it. I would argue what they're doing is illegal because the law is pretty clear. You need to show where the origin of it is, but they're trying to hide it and mask it and Yale is not alone in doing this. - How long has this been going on at the universities?

I would say probably 15 or 20 years, but over the last four or five years, it's really ramped up because, you know, in the early 2000s, obviously 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 20 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 even University of Montana, which people would think, oh, why would China be interested there? There are Chinese connections at the University of Montana as well. It's everywhere. Wow. Do you think this is reversible? 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 public in the United States as this really quiet, docile, large beast.

That when awakened, watch out. And I think it needs to be awakened. And I think when it's awakened, you need to start asking hard questions at these universities about the strings attached, forcing them to reveal what they're doing. And I think some alumni should insist 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.

Do you think that they're going to start concentrating on lower education like high schools, elementary schools, middle schools, or are they going to stick with the universities? Well, 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 four 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 think they are going to look for these opportunities anywhere that they can. And it's only going to 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 really believe, and I know you believe the same way, in a competition for 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 going to let us do it in your country, we're not going to let you do it in our country. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that.

Let's move into banking. So you've broken banking up into BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater. Bridgewater Associates, yeah. Where do you want to start?

Boy, 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 requires them to not only turn a blind eye to China,

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. So I'll pick 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 the cable news, CNBC, financial networks all the time talking about China, talking about investing.

Dahlia 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 Wang Qishan, who's the number two guy in China, second most powerful person in China.

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

No. Exactly. I mean, it's ridiculous stuff. But he's helped me unlock the secrets of the universe. And he says, this guy has been a remarkable force for good for decades. So I thought, okay, so who is this guy? Who's Wong Ki-Shon? So I went online and I looked at all these sort of reputable sources. Well, it turns out Wong Ki-Shon is President Xi's enforcer.

So if a guy gets thrown into jail, if a guy gets tortured, Wonky Sean's the guy that makes it happen. He's called, The Economist magazine calls him the most feared man in China. 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 Wonky Sean?

uh 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, 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 markets.

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?

It's propaganda. It also, of course, helps build wealth. 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 package deal. There's a Maoist

concept that still is widespread 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.

do for them. And that's what they basically done with Wall Street. So you take somebody like Blackstone, which is a big private equity firm run by Stephen Schwartzman. Blackstone, when it was launched in the 1980s, one of the first investors and owners of Blackstone was a Chinese government 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. 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 Schwarzman's gone further. He started this program called the Schwarzman 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. 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. This is a disaster. This is so bad. 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 Schwarzman is funding. It's all in the footnotes. It's all based on Chinese materials. Wow. This is just so concerning. I just, it's...

Well, let's move in. Let's move into the politics. Okay. 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 I'd like to start maybe with, let's start with...

Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell, all right. The top Republican in the Senate. Yes. Senator from the state of Kentucky. Mitch McConnell's a very interesting figure. So he married in the early 1990s, he married Elaine Chao. And Elaine Chao, of course, was the transportation secretary in the Trump administration. She's been active in Republican circles for decades.

Her family, the Chow family, originally from Taiwan, but her father was educated in mainland China 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. And Foremost Shipping was, you know, a relatively small shipping company in the 1990s. But then Elaine Chow marries Mitch McConnell.

And in 1993, Mitch McConnell takes a trip to Beijing with his father-in-law, where they are 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. 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. 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-Chow family. So what's happened since 1993 is the Chinese government has been in the business of helping the McConnell-Chow family's business grow. So today, fast forward to today, where are we?

The Formos 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 waiting to get unloaded. Those big, massive ships. All those big ships for the McConnell-Chow family business are built by the Chinese government.

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, 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 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 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. 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, right?

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 money, to capital, don't mess with that. And that's really what Mitch McConnell has done. So he's been 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 $5 and $25 million. Wow. So he is a direct beneficiary of the success of that shipping business. That's probably a small...

A small little present too. Yes. That is a small, relative to the size of the business. Absolutely. Wow. Diane Feinstein. Yes. This is the one, this is the laptops at the Marine Corps. Just blow my mind. When I, when I read this in, in that court case, I was absolutely stunned. So,

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 always think it's important for us to separate China.

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 U.S. Senate, became 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 conflict is between these deals and her duties. 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 an investor in a Chinese computer company called Legend, which ends up selling laptops to the U.S. 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. 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.

Do you know how many laptops they sold to the Marine Corps by chance? I think it's hundreds. Hundreds? Yes, hundreds. And it was discovered... I don't know that it was terribly sophisticated in the way it was done, but I found 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 fact that they got these laptops, they unpacked them, they started using them. And then they noticed that, you know, 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 immediately canceled all the contracts. Do you know how long this was going?

How long the Marine Corps was using these laptops? I think it was probably 8 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 to make these laptops? Was the fact that

the senator's husband was involved. Was that a factor? I don't know. I'm sure it was. Yeah, but I mean, to me, that's outrageous. And I know there's been a lot 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

pretty widespread practice by China. Yeah, I just want to say something for the audience. Depending on what level of access those computers were plugged into, it could have been low-level access, it could have been extremely high-level access, and once they're plugged in to whichever network of access that they've been granted,

they have access to everything. You know, it depends what level, but... Because it's a network. Yes. Is what you're saying. Because it's a network. So the minute that computer gets plugged in, you're in, you know? So... Yeah. I don't know what access level they were granted, but that could have... That could be... It could have been huge. Yeah. It could have been huge. And if it's 100 computers, let's hope it was low-level access. But again, like you said, and you wonder...

You just wonder how that decision was made. That's insane. And her driver was recruited. Yes, 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 and went to her.

He was not questioned. He was not, Dianne Feinstein just simply let him go on the advice of the FBI, but basically said it wasn't true. No, he was a good guy. He couldn't have been a spy.

You know, she has made so many ridiculous statements over the years, Sean, that you wonder if even a spy was necessary. 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 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 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 an absurd statement to make.

She said that the Chinese threat is more about racism than it is about reality. 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 would go out on a limb here and say, and you would know more about this than me, 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. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. A real hard time. Once you're in, you're not even allowed to go there with a certain level of clearance. And anybody that you come in contact with who is from there, you have to report and run that up to the chain so that they can know that that person's clean, supposedly. None of those were required of any of the political figures we're talking about.

Of course not. Do you have any idea how many politicians have been paid off? It's hard to know. I think it was Rumsfeld who said, you don't know what you don't know. I think it's a lot. I mean, we do know, one of the things I talk about in the book is people that after they leave Congress, a lot of them become lobbyists. There are at least 23 lobbyists.

Republicans and Democrats, who are lobbying in Washington, D.C., 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, you know, develop the monitoring software that the Chinese state uses to watch people, the sort of big brother stuff that was written about in 1984. One of the companies designed monitoring software so they can, it's facial recognition. So it's not just facial recognition to who you are, but they can identify you by your ethnicity, right?

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. Some of these are 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 to try to keep them out of the crosshairs

of anybody doing anything about it in Washington. So if you've got 23 former members that are doing it that we know of, and you talk about Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, senior Democrat senator, you can imagine that there are absolutely a lot more. You know, working, I did some work at the CIA, and I know how much goes into

recruiting an asset and getting getting that person to flip sometimes that can take that can take a long that can take years yeah do you have any idea on average maybe how long it's taken to flip some of these congressmen senators political figures and on top of that are people going into politics right now knowing that they're going to get a paycheck from the Chinese

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 warms well 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. Maybe we'll talk a little bit later about, but the Bush family, I mean, the Bush family has 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

you're talking about people that are either for sale or are they just for rent? And I guess what I mean is, uh,

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. 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

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. I think we plan,

Six months in advance, a year in advance. I know there are serious thinkers 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. You mentioned George Bush earlier, the Bush family. And when I heard about what's going on with the Bush family, that was...

I love the Bush family. Yeah. There's a lot to admire there. 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 wouldn't have become a SEAL. I really liked him. And so let's dive into the Bush family. Yeah. I mean, in a case with a lot of these people, there are things 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 U.S. 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. 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. 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 uh george w bush's brother uh is

Frankly, I mean a shill 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. 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 the human rights situation in Hong Kong is not all that bad, 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 multiple corporate boards in China. Again, it's not really clear what he's bringing to that equation other than the fact that 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.

I mean, they can just yank the company right out, you know, just like that. Exactly. They're communist. 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 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 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 look at human weaknesses and try to use it to your advantage. Yep. We definitely do that. Nancy Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi. This is another one that 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. There was an official congressional delegation that went to Beijing, 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 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. And that's where she was for a very long time.

The problem is in the late 2000s, her husband and her son started looking for deals in China. Her husband became a partner investor in this investment fund. 80% of the money was deals in mainland China. He had other business interests there. Her son got involved with several companies that was looking for deals in China. And it really kind of pivoted.

in the 2008 Olympics. You know, the Olympics right now are going on in China. A lot of people might forget that in 2008, the Summer Olympics were in Beijing. So in 2007, Nancy Pelosi wanted a boycott of the Olympics. 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 that quick 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 laughed 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. What are those larger issues? Did she mention this? You know, 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 people that are very animated about climate change take towards China,

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.

So it's bizarre to me, you know, if you want to take the position that yeah, 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, 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. Is there any up and comers that we should be...

Watching closely off the top of your head. That are good? That are coming up in politics. Yes. I talk in the book about there are some people on both sides of the aisle that have been good on China.

So we'll talk about Democrats first, for example. Joe Manchin, senator from West Virginia, very good on China. 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 again.

But he actually comes from a family who he's heir to the fortune for Gore-Tex, you know, the technology that makes things waterproof. And they actually have some business they're doing in China. So 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. Senator Rick Scott of Florida has been very good on China. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been very good on China. And I would say 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 Trump was pursuing policies against China that China was really pushing back on, Schumer stuck with him.

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

Have you looked into Trump at all? Does he have ties in China? I have. I have looked at China. I wrote a book a couple years ago called Secret Empires. I have a chapter on the Trump family in there. There are some China ties, and I think there have definitely been efforts by China to cultivate that relationship.

There were some condos that were sold in Trump Tower to China nationals who are said to be linked to so-called United Front groups. We know that Ivanka Trump 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 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 that is good and important. And I hope that he will continue to adopt that posture now as a private citizen. Was there any backlash to his business dealings in China?

After he came out and he was so tough on them as president? I think most of those. He doesn't have active business in China. He was selling condos, his condos in the United States and New York. 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. Yeah.

But he doesn't have ongoing businesses there. 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. Yeah. Well, you've unveiled a ton of information on a lot of different people, right?

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 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. How long has the Biden family been in cahoots with the Chinese? 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 U.S. 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. It's interesting. So are they using Hunter to get to Joe or to influence Joe? Do you think they're actively influencing Hunter?

I think they are. I think they are. And I think it happens a couple of ways. So 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?

Who made it rain for the Bidens in China? And then we wanted to try to quantify it. So it started in 2012, 2013. We found that the Bidens got some $31 million in deals from China. There's no, to my mind, there's no discernible difference

business activity or service that was performed. They didn't set up some banking deal for them somewhere. 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 named 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, a 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.

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. Which is...

the chinese version of cia 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 dollar 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

of state security who ran the entire spy apparatus of China. So you see where this is going. - I just want to go back for just a second. So when you talk about he was in charge, Chae Fang's business partner was in charge of foreign national recruitment. What that means is they're recruiting

Americans and flipping them as Chinese spies. So they're paying Americans to spy for China. Correct. 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, D.C., 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.

And he made cash transfers to Hunter Biden. So this is not just a story of trading off a family name, of cronyism, self-dealing corruption. 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. Yeah, I think it's pretty out in the open. It's pretty remarkable. And so then the other question becomes, 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. So that's how Hunter is getting the money to President Biden? 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 20s. You know, those of us that are older that have kids, you're in the situation where your kids need money and

and Hunter Biden's frustrated and he says to her, well, you know, I don't have cash right now, but, you know, hopefully you're not going to be in my situation. I'm not going to ask you to do what Pop asked me to do, which is send you half the money that I earn. Are you serious? Yes. He says that in a text message. Now,

Is that hyperbole? 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 illegal. You cannot, as a politician, you cannot have family members and family member businesses subsidizing your lifestyle.

So that's absolutely against the law, what they were doing. It reaches a crescendo, Sean, on this intelligence side in 2017, when Joe Biden is now out of the Obama administration. He's a private citizen.

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

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 a entity linked to Chinese intelligence. That's how bad it got. - Wow. Unbelievable. Let's talk about Pen Yu. - Yeah.

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 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. 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 20-something years, 30-something years. When he was in the Senate, he was in the Foreign Relations Committee, his vice president role.

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.

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.

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, but why are they... I mean, why are you the only one that's digging into this? 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 weeks ago that the IRS went to J.P. Morgan. That's the bank where Hunter Biden did a lot of his finances and subpoenaed all the financial transactions from China. So there is interest in this. But the frustration for me is it's 2022. The grand jury is still meeting, but it started almost four years ago.

The IRS subpoenas were in 2019. That's almost three years ago. 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? I'm definitely not a lawyer. I didn't think so. I didn't know if there was like some night school that you had done 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 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 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 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 release some information publicly. And that's really where I think this stuff needs to be. I hope so. I mean, they are so open. I mean, I read that Hunter Biden came out.

And just publicly said, 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 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 American people going to do to me? It's very discouraging. And particularly the media has been completely absent on that. I think there's a couple of reasons. I think one is, look, 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 a lot of news outlets don't have the resources that they once had. That's part of the explanation. The other part, I think, 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 was going to help Trump in some way.

My view is like, take the politics out of this. My view is report all the stuff on Trump. I mean, if you're going to report the stuff on his taxes, do it. I mean, be accurate about it, but report it. It should be out there. 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 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 or benefit Trump in some way. Who cares? Just put the facts out there. Let the American people decide.

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

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 worth of military equipment looks like.

Doesn't matter what it looks like, but it's extremely effective because I've used a lot of it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, 80 billion is a lot. It's a lot of equipment. And I think there's some news reports now that they're selling some of it on the market. Probably the more advanced stuff, especially. I mean, it's very hard to know why somebody does something. You can always apply the old Roman idea, who benefits, right? When somebody does something, who benefits, right?

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. You know, we did this. What do they call the diplomatic protest of the Olympics? Yeah, 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 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'm interested in your thoughts on it. I certainly think there were huge...

huge things that could have been done differently from the beginning 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. And that is a question that

you know, has to be asked and investigated again. It's not being done, but it needs to be. Yeah. Well, we could, we could start with just a little bit of planning, a little bit of planning. And I guess the, a lot of people have talked to the abandonment of the air base there and,

Bagram Air Base was apparently a big mistake. But yeah, it's this question of who benefits. And I think 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 giving China what they want.

Moving out of the Bidens, as I said in the beginning, your book has created a wave, and I think it's doing exactly what you intended it to do. 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. That's right. McCarthy. 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 again, for me, this is not the fact that it's Joe Biden. It's a fact 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 or they won't. 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. There's also sanctions. They're talking about

sanctions against the CCP. Do you want to talk about that? 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 own stocks on the 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 benefit 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 U.S. officials. I think that's a great idea. Yeah.

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 American politicians don't have commercial investments in China. Brilliant. Let's do it. 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 the average American do about this? 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 and you're helping them compete with us.

So that's the second thing. Third thing, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but 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.

But if you own a investment fund that is Asia Pacific based, chances are 30 to 40%, 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 the classic saying, you know, Vladimir Lenin who said, you know, they're going to 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 next thing I would say is call out people on your own side. 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 and 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 are good people in both parties that want to 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.

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.

Sure, I'd love it if everybody went out and bought 10 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. And I think if we do that, watch out. We are going to be in a great place as a country and we are going to win this race. 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.

I just want to thank you so much for coming. This is awesome. I've enjoyed it. This is great. Me too. You've got a great place here. This is epic. Thank you. I need something like this. We'll pour you a drink afterwards. That's good. But yeah, thank you so much for coming. And I just wish you the best of luck. And I hope everybody buys your book and informs themselves about what's going on because it's

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, and hope to, I hope to see you again soon. Thanks, Sean. It's been an honor to be here with you and I appreciate all you've done for our country. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan show. If you haven't already,

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