In what may be a clear cut example of a Biden nominee lying to Congress, CIA Director Bill Burns has more to answer for.
Burns became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2015 and claimed, during Senate confirmation hearings, that he merely “inherited” the think tank’s longstanding relationship with the China-United States-Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).
Lying to Congress?
Purporting to be “increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations,” Burns – who currently leads the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – was adamant he cut Carnegie’s ties with CUSEF “not long after” he began his tenure while answering questions from Senator Marco Rubio.
Rubio explained that CUSEF is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which seeks “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies,” according to the U.S. government.
The U.S. State Department also compares the United Front to the Chinese regime’s “magic weapon” to advance its preferred policies by infiltrating American politics, media, and academia.
In response, Burns claimed that “…on the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, this is a relationship that I inherited when I became president of Carnegie and that I ended not long after I became president precisely for the concerns that you just described because we were increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations. Shortly after I ended that relationship, we began a program at the Carnegie Endowment on countering foreign influence operations which was aimed mostly at China and Russia and was supported in part from a grant from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department in the last administration.”
Still A ‘United Front’.
But Burns’s think tank continued to accept funds and collaborate with officials tied to CUSEF during his tenure, and recently released another research paper on the subject of cyber attacks, in partnership with CUSEF and other Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions. The paper, released March 2022, is the latest piece of evidence contradicting...