(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Meetings between Chinese government officials and politically-connected US citizens continue to crop up as China attempts to maintain its influence in the White House.
It was recently discovered that Maurice Greenberg, CEO of Starr Insurance Companies, along with other hand-picked business leaders and former government officials hosted a meeting with representatives from the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs to discuss geopolitical issues such as Taiwan, North Korea and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration was briefed after the conference, days before President Joe Biden met General Secretary Xi Jinping in Indonesia.
According to the Daily Caller, Greenberg has had his fingers in the political pie for several decades, donating money to less-than-promising GOP political candidates like Jeb Bush and befriending more successful politicians along the way.
Several of those politicians accompanied him to the CPIFA meeting, including former Democratic Senator for Connecticut, Joe Liebermann, and former ambassador to China, Max Baucus.
Both of these men are part of a coalition created by Greenburg, whose stated goal is to “re-establish a constructive bilateral dialogue” with the Eastern nation.
“They are either demonstrating extreme naïveté or they are fully aware of who they are meeting with,” Peter Schweizer, author of Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, said.
“None of these individuals strike me as naïve.”
There is speculation concerning the CPIFA’s motives in the United States. Some allege that the group acts as a representative for the interests of the United Front Work Department.
The UFWD has an extensive history of spying, propagandizing and acting as an enforcer for the Chinese Communist Party in the states.
Greenberg has worked closely with China for years, despite their blatant human rights abuses, going as far as accompanying former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Beijing just months after the Tienanmen Square Massacre.
Lieberman and Baucus are also fiscally invested in China, both having a history of sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into blacklisted Chinese companies.
“The influence problem is far more our financial and tech companies pushing their short-term profits and stock prices as being vital to world peace or climate change cooperation or whatever the excuse of the day is,” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“They’d be doing that even if there was no United Front Work Department.”
