The Patriot Post® · China Probes the Fed and Our Nuclear Arsenal

When it became clear that Joe Biden’s (ahem) 81 million votes would be enough to win the presidency and oust Donald Trump from the Oval Office, no one was happier than Xi Jinping and his merry band of Wuhan Flu-spreading, live-organ-harvesting, intellectual-property-thieving Chinese communists.

And let’s be clear: The ChiComs aren’t a strategic trading partner, or even a geopolitical rival. They’re an enemy of the United States and the world’s leading threat to our freedom-loving way of life. Unfortunately, our current commander-in-chief can’t seem to get this through his thick skull.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, was calling out the commies long before he became our 45th president. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he said back on May 1, 2016.

Think about that. It took years of scholarly work and a thorough exploration of Ronald Reagan’s papers to put the lie to the Left’s dismissal of him as “an amiable dunce.” And here, in just 10 words uttered more than six years ago, we see unequivocally that Donald Trump understood then what Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats continue to deny to this day.

During his tenure, Trump did many excellent things. Sensible things. Conservative things. Strategically vital things. And if not for the corrupt triumvirate of Big Tech, Big Media, and the Deep State, he’d still be president, and gas would still be $2.57 a gallon, and store shelves would still be stocked, and our retirement plans would still be on track. And Communist China would still be in check.

If. If, if if.

Instead, though, we have a president whose corrupt ties to Red China have been painfully and exhaustively documented on these pages. And we have a ChiCom menace that’s never been more emboldened.

Coincidence?

We think not. Just now, in fact, we’re learning more about that Red Menace and what Senate Republicans are calling “a sustained effort by China, over more than a decade, to gain influence over the Federal Reserve and a failure by the Federal Reserve to combat this threat effectively.”

That’s right. China has been trying to infiltrate and surreptitiously influence the central bank of the United States. As The Wall Street Journal reports:

China tried to build a network of informants inside the Federal Reserve system, at one point threatening to imprison a Fed economist during a trip to Shanghai unless he agreed to provide nonpublic economic data, a congressional investigation found.

The investigation by Republican staff members of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found that Fed employees were offered contracts with Chinese talent-recruitment programs, which often include cash payments, and asked to provide information on the U.S. economy, interest-rate changes and policies, according to a report of the findings released Tuesday.

In the case of the economist, the report said, Chinese officials in 2019 detained and tried to coerce him to share data and information on U.S. government policies, including on tariffs while the U.S. and China were in the midst of a trade war.

Not surprisingly, mealy-mouthed Fed Chairman Jerome Powell leaped to China’s defense. “Because we understand that some actors aim to exploit any vulnerabilities, our processes, controls, and technology are robust and updated regularly. We respectfully reject any suggestions to the contrary,” he wrote in a letter to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s ranking member, Ohio Republican Rob Portman.

Why is it we have an image in our head of Chairman Powell stepping off a plane, waving a piece of paper above his head, and saying “We have peace for our time”?

As Portman rightly put it, “This investigation makes clear that China’s malign efforts at influence and information theft are not limited to science and technology fields — American economic and monetary policy is also being targeted by the Chinese government.”

It’d be plenty bad if this was the only troubling news about China to hit us in the face this week. But it isn’t. As CNN (of all news networks) reports: “Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities." 

The report goes on to note that among the most alarming things the FBI uncovered was that this Chinese equipment was "capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons.”

As columnist Gary Bauer succinctly put it, Trump was right. And by now, anyone who doesn’t take seriously the threat from Communist China is a useful idiot.

President Biden: Looking at you.