House Speaker Nancy Pelosi softened her previous criticisms of China’s communist regime as her husband and son scored big business deals in China, Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s new book reveals.
The bombshell revelations about Pelosi in Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win also come as the Democrat stalwart is under fire for stock trading returns made by her and her husband that regularly outperform the market. Now, it appears as though her family’s business opportunities in China have influenced her policy views on America’s chief adversary, something sure to fuel the fire to rein in corruption in Congress.
Pelosi’s family, Schweizer reveals, has had millions of dollars on the line when it comes to China, and the Speaker seems to have altered her positions on China’s communist regime from a policy perspective as these investments grew and took shape.
Pelosi began her career as tough on China and still occasionally rips the Chinese Communist Party for human rights abuses.
“The longtime member of Congress and Speaker of the House was, early in her career, a particularly harsh critic of China’s human rights practices,” Schweizer writes. “She continues to be vocal about some issues, but her positions have softened as her family has sought and received lucrative commercial opportunities in mainland China.”
In the early 1990s, Schweizer recounts how she even pulled off a protest in Tiananmen Square that infuriated Chinese officials:
In 1991, as a junior member of Congress, Pelosi found herself in Tiananmen Square. She was part of a congressional delegation visiting Beijing barely two years after the horrific events had un- folded. Pelosi had been in meetings with Chinese officials, but with a couple of colleagues, she covertly carried a banner into the middle of the square and unfurled it in front of a small crowd and the media. “To those who died for Democracy in China,” it read. The Chinese police were furious. They pushed through the crowd to seize the banner. “I started running,” Pelosi recalled. “And my colleagues, some of them, got a little roughed up. The press got treated worse because they had cameras, and they were detained.” The Foreign Ministry denounced the event as a “premeditated farce.This move was not an isolated incident; Pelosi actually was tough on China for years.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with Rep. Ben Jones (D-GA), left, and Rep. John Miller (R-WA), right, hold a banner in Tiananmen Square on September 4, 1991, to honor the pro-democracy protesters slain by China’s communist regime in the 1989 massacre. (AP Photo)
Schweizer also recounts how Pelosi fought against giving China most-favored-nation trade status and against allowing China entry into the World Trade Organization. He also noted that in 2005, Pelosi spoke on the House floor in support of an amendment to block the Chinese National Overseas Oil Company (CNOOC), a Chinese government-backed entity, from purchasing Unocal, a California-based...