“The Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
When politicians go into “public service,” they usually go there to make a living while making America a better place.
As years went on, politicians have enriched themselves with dirty stock deals and other deals they struck based on inside information.
But in the last few years, politicians have decided to make a living while making China great again—and a new book has all the receipts.
Crusading investigative journalist Peter Schweizer of the Government Accountability Institute has released a blockbuster that names names and digs up all the bodies.
Schweizer’s new book, Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, lists 23 “national leaders” who gave China the assistance it wanted on its way to replacing the United States as the only global superpower.
There are names on both sides of the aisle — from yesterday and today.
For instance, who remembers John Boehner, the chain-smoking former Speaker of the House who always sported a strange orange tan?
A group of Republicans and Democrats wanted to hold China accountable for the way it has manipulated its currency… which gives its exports a leg up in U.S. markets and makes it harder for U.S. companies to export to China.
In 2011, when Boehner (an Ohio Republican) was Speaker, they drew up the Currency Exchange Oversight Reform Act—and the Senate passed it on a landslide 63-35 vote. Most members of the House of Representatives had lined up in support. All it needed was a full vote.
China knew if the bill passed, its number was up—so the People’s Republic invested $35,000 a month to hire a high-powered Washington lobbying firm named Squire Patton Boggs to kill it.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, then-Speaker Boehner announced he wouldn’t bring the bill to the floor and said the idea behind it was “pretty dangerous.” So much for Chinese accountability — and so long to lots of well-paying manufacturing jobs in places like Boehner’s home state of Ohio.
But it did create one job… for Boehner. He served the Chinese Communists so well that after he retired, Beijing gave Boehner a sack of cash.
In 2015, Squire Patton Boggs hired Boehner as a “strategic adviser.” The group helps China figure out how to thwart anything the government would do to hurt its interests. One of SPB’s senior partners in China, Nick Chan, is a member of the National People’s Congress.
Unfortunately, Boehner has done better work advancing Chinese interests than he ever did for America.
While we’re walking down the RINO hall of fame, while Boehner was in the House, the “Republican” Senate Majority Leader was Trent Lott of Mississippi. He left Congress after some embarrassing remarks and decided to pay the bills as a lobbyist for ByteDance… but you probably know them better for one of the enterprises they run: TikTok.
President Donald Trump raised massive security concerns about TikTok, which lets users post ultra-short videos to its social media platform; but ByteDance hired Trent Lott to help it figure out how to respond.
It isn’t all Republicans who work for China, of course. Beijing has its hooks in both parties.
Former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., decided she could make a little cash working for a company called Hikvision, which is owned by the China Electronics Group, which — like other Chinese companies — answers to the Chinese Communist Party.
Hikvision makes surveillance cameras that the CCP uses to monitor the one million-plus Uighur Muslims that the government has imprisoned in concentration camps in Xianjiang province.
Boxer has expert knowledge to help China; she used to sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
She quit after the public found out about her actions in 2017 — but another Democrat stayed on the payroll. Former Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., raked in $1.75 million in 2019 alone after lobbying for the Chicoms.
Let’s remember one more name: former U.S. Senator and vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
Lieberman was Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 election; after Gore took more than a month to concede, bumper stickers made a play on their last names and called them “Sore-Loserman.” Lieberman eventually left the party, retired from Congress, and went to work lobbying for ZTE Corporation, which Breitbart News describes as “a military-linked Chinese telecommunications firm.”
These are just a handful of American politicians who quit working “for the American people” and started working for China; the book names 23.
But jobs like this raise an important question: Just when did these people start working for China — after they left office, or did China offer them the job for favors they granted while they were in power?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”