House Republicans issued a stark warning this week that the Biden-Harris Administration has failed to organize the federal bureaucracy to combat covert Chinese influence and made a stark assessment of federal agencies’ weak response to the threat.

The investigation shows that a federal bureaucracy has been caught off guard, even as experts have increasingly sounded the alarm about China’s efforts to undermine US interests.

On the eve of the election, the report also raised specific concerns about Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz as an example of how Chinese influence operators can target state and local officials with the potential to grow in power and influence. hoping to curry favor in the future — a strategy called “elite capture” — at a time when Walz is poised to be vice president if Democrats win the national contest.

The House Oversight Committee says its interviews and briefings with officials show that “most agencies lack a coherent strategy to identify, counter, and deter CCP political warfare—too often because CCP influence operations have interfered with judgment, discretion and fulfillment. of duties by the federal agencies themselves.”

The broad report it results from the investigation of the Oversight Committee of the Chamber in 25 government sectors and their response to the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. The probe was launched in March to reveal China’s efforts to infiltrate and influence the United States amid increasingly dire warnings from all quarters that China is waging a new cold war by unconventional means.

“The House Oversight Committee has exposed the CCP’s political warfare and is working to ensure that the federal government formulates a coherent strategy to combat CCP threats and protect all Americans. The CCP is successfully infiltrating and influencing critical communities and sectors in this nation, and the Biden-Harris Administration is asleep at the wheel,” Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a press release.

“Today’s report details how federal agencies have failed to understand, recognize or develop a plan to combat the CCP’s political warfare, and Americans are left to fend for themselves,” he added. “It is past time for federal agencies to take this threat seriously and meet their responsibilities to the American people.”

You can read the report below:

The political war

The report offers a stark assessment of a federal bureaucracy frozen in ignorance or aloofness China’s Political War against the United States.

Political warfare, also known as attrition warfare, has been described by a Chinese military source as a strategy that “consists of degrading the enemy’s resolve and impeding his ability to mobilize by sowing divisions in the enemy’s camp and attracting critical elements on his own side”.

Despite countless assessments by experts, think tanks and former intelligence officials that China has engaged in this strategy with the United States, the Oversight Committee found that many federal bureaucrats were completely unfamiliar with the term and its implications. “A State Department official had to ask the Committee to define political warfare during a briefing on the CCP’s political warfare and the department’s response to it,” the committee wrote.

It wasn’t the first time a State Department official had dismissed China’s strategy. When former counterintelligence officer and Chinese political warfare expert Kerry Gershaneck asked the State Department how he taught the subject at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, “they had no idea what (he) was talking about,” according to Gershaneck.

One of the main organs of political warfare identified by the researchers is the working system of China’s United Front, which President Xi Jinping calls the CCP’s “magic weapons” designed to “undermine the sovereignty and integrity of the political system of the targeted states.”

The system includes the United Front Work Department, Chinese intelligence agencies, and a network of military and civilian organizations around the world connected to the CCP.

It poses a specific threat to the United States because of our open political and economic system and is a driver of “technology transfer, surveillance of Chinese diaspora communities, promotion of favorable narratives about the PRC” in the country, according to a a Select Committee of the House of the Chinese Communist Party report.

Yet despite the fact that the Chinese leadership so clearly identified its purpose, only one federal agency of the 23 that presented to the Oversight Committee mentioned the united front when briefing lawmakers on the Chinese political war.

Targeting and infiltration

State and local governments are also in the “crosshairs” of CCP influence operations, but the committee found that the Commerce Department has been “silent on the issue.”

“The CCP has successfully targeted and infiltrated US state and local government officials for decades. However, the Commerce Department has been silent on the issue – despite the clear link between CCP influence operations and economic activity with China across the country,” the committee wrote.

Recent examples abound of the threat Chinese influence operations can pose to all levels of government. The committee pointed to Tim Walz’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party as an example and warning of how the country seeks to influence American politicians, even those at the state and local levels.

Developed through his numerous trips to the country while leading student tours that were funded in part by the Chinese government, the relationship, the committee says, is a prime example of China’s influence operations and serves as a warning to state and local officials about Chinese intentions.

“State and local government officials’ ties to the CCP, such as Walz, make US government officials vulnerable to the Party’s elite capture strategy, which seeks to co-opt, manipulate and influence prominent individuals to shape American discourse and decision-making. to the benefit of the communist regime and to the detriment of America,” the committee wrote in its report.

A new investigation found that in addition to Tim Walz’s many trips to China with students, he and welcomed a delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials in the Nebraska classroom when he was a teacher there, the Daily caller reported. Waltz too apparently praised the Chinese Communist system, saying that “everyone is the same and everyone shares” in China.

In New York, a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul — Linda Sun —was indicted for allegedly trying to use his role in the state government to benefit the Chinese Communist Party. She pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Bribery, hiring and relationships

In Michigan, the committee highlighted the government’s role in supporting investment by companies connected to the state’s CCP. The most controversial of the projects, the proposed Gotion battery plant was subject of local reactions and accusations that company officials may have bribed or induced a local government to approve the project, Just the news previously reported.

Last May, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., was investigated by House investigators over his interactions with an alleged Chinese spy, Christine Fang, who had worked on Swalwell’s campaign and targeted up-and-coming California politicians, including Swalwell. House closed the investigation with a secret letter and took no further action accordingly Hill.

Influential Democratic leader Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., was found to have hired a Chinese spy as her personal driver for more than 20 years, CBS News reported in 2018.

Former ambassador and director of the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group, Joseph Cella, has worked to galvanize public opposition to the Michigan Gotion plant through his think tank, highlighting the company’s national security risks related to the CCP and criticizing the state and the state of Michigan. local officials for failing to protect their citizens.

“The nature of the CCP is well captured in the report, as is the pursuit of the CCP and the threat it poses to the United States, as well as the opportunities and imperative to counter it,” he said. Just the news in a statement.

“Whereas federal agencies are currently not enforcing the standing rules and vigorously countering various threats from the CCP and various sectors of society, such as state and local governments and academia, in defiance of the directives and advice of our national security and intelligence agencies , this will be a long and complex period. fight, but it must be met head-on,” he continued.