Well, this seems like a huge conflict of interest:
William J. Burns, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for director of the CIA, is president of a think tank that has received up to $2 million from a Chinese businessman as well as from a think tank with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Burns also invited nearly a dozen congressional staffers to attend a junket to China, where they met with a communist party operative and a president of a Chinese front group.
Burns, who was paid $540,580 last year as president of Carnegie, will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing likely to be held this month. He has been president of Carnegie since March 2015.
During Burns’ tenure at Carnegie, a businessman named Zhang Yichen joined the think tank’s board of trustees.
“We are very fortunate to have Zhang Yichen on our board,” Burns, a former deputy secretary of state, said in a statement in October 2016. “I look forward to working with him to make Carnegie an even finer institution.”
Zhang, the CEO of CITIC Consulting, a China-based investment firm, donated between $500,000 and $999,999 to Carnegie from July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2018, according to Carnegie’s website. He gave between $250,000 and $549,999 in the 2020 fiscal year, according to Carnegie’s 2020 annual report.
Zhang is a member of two organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party, according to his biography at CITIC Capital: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the Center for China and Globalization.
Can you imagine any Cold War president nominating a CIA director who worked for a think tank that took Soviet money? “Sure, Hubert J. Kissup’s Detente Institute took money from the Young Communist League, but you should confirm him because he’s a swell guy!”
Notice how quickly our garbage elites went from “Ivanaka Trump sells clothing in Russia! This is a huge conflict of interest!” to “CIA director bringing in a half million dollars in Communist Chinese money at his last gig? Nothing to see here! Move along, pleb!”
President Trump’s list of his administration’s accomplishments cites numerous instances of confronting and reigning-in communist China. However, Democratic Party grandees seem far more concerned with sucking up to, appeasing, and profiting off China than confronting it. From Hunter Biden’s documented payoffs from China to universities taking money from China to Hollywood studios bowing to censorship pressure to attempting to repress any mention of the possibility that the Wuhan cornavirus escaped from a Chinese lab to getting a case of the vapors over mentioning Flu Manchu as the “China Virus” to a sitting Democratic congressman literally banging a communist spy, our garbage Democratic ruling class is in bed with communist China both literally and figuratively.
The Burns nomination should be rejected on the basis of his Chinese ties alone.