The House Oversight Committee is launching the second phase of its sweeping investigation into the U.S. government’s response to the Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations and malign behavior, National Review has exclusively learned.
Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), the panel’s chairman, sent letters to nine federal agencies today requesting briefings on how each of them is grappling with threats posed by Beijing. Previously, the committee had sent a first tranche of letters to several other agencies in March, and it held a hearing last month focused on Chinese influence campaigns.
“China experts—with decades of experience in U.S. intelligence, national security, and the military—testified before the House Oversight Committee that the CCP’s ambitions to influence the United States are destructive, dangerous, and jeopardize the safety of all Americans,” Comer said today, in a statement issued to National Review.
“The Committee has a responsibility to ensure that the federal government is taking every action necessary to protect Americans from the CCP’s ongoing political warfare,” he said.
The letters today were addressed to the heads of the FBI, the State Department, the Commerce Department, the National Institutes of Health, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Energy.
While each letter focused on a set of issues specific to each agency, they all warned that Beijing uses a united-front strategy to influence people who are not members of the party in order to induce them to do the regime’s bidding.
The letters all also refer to a 1999 book written by People’s Liberation Army officers, titled “Unrestricted Warfare,” which set out several tactics that China could use to “defeat America through political warfare,” as Comer put it.
“As all Americans are targets of the PRC’s warfare, federal agencies have responsibilities to (1) conduct outreach to citizens about the dangers they may encounter, and (2) provide appropriate incentives for Americans to proactively protect themselves—their communities, schools, houses of worship, businesses, finances, food, and more—from the threat,” he wrote.
Comer attributes his understanding of these threats to three of the witnesses who appeared at the committee’s first hearing on China: Robert Spalding, a retired brigadier general who served on the Trump-era National Security Council; Grant Newsham, a retired Marine colonel; and former CIA analyst Peter Mattis.
The letters raised a wide-ranging set of concerns, touching on political-influence operations, medical supply chains, intellectual-property theft, America’s reliance on “cheap products made in China,” Chinese government-backed activity on U.S. campuses, espionage targeting Department of Energy–run national laboratories, and more. They gave each agency one week to respond and set up a briefing addressing a specific set of questions.
In his letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Comer expressed particular concern about the party’s efforts to cultivate influence among state and local officials. Because they focus on economic development and job growth, they are “soft targets for the CCP’s political warfare.”
He cited federal government warnings that the united-front system leverages its relationships with lower-level officials to pressure Washington. He also pointed to recent reports about CCP influence campaigns in Utah and to National Review’s reporting about New York City mayor Eric Adams’s ties to the Chinese regime.
Comer wrote that he wants to look at how the Commerce Department’s Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs can play a role in liaising with state and local officials to educate them about the risks of engagement with Chinese government entities.
At various points in some of the letters, Comer criticized the Biden administration’s handling of China policy.
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Comer questioned Foggy Bottom’s promotion of efforts to expand “people-to-people” ties with China, noting that the email account of U.S. ambassador to China Nicholas Burns was hacked by people based in the country. Comer wrote that the department should not promote tourism to China without acknowledging the risks posed by traveling there.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, he said that the Justice Department had “abruptly and mistakenly” ended its China Initiative.