(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Reports have emerged suggesting that China has attempted to infiltrate the United States Federal Reserve banking system and influence American monetary policy to its own advantage, Fox News reported.
The damning report was released by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee earlier this week.
Since at least 2013, a group of Federal Reserve employees and U.S.-based economists known in the report as the “P-Network” took numerous trips to China, and some were reported to have engaged in multiple conversations with Chinese state officials.
One employee was even detained by Chinese authorities on multiple occasions, and was “threatened the individual’s family unless the individual provided them with economic information and assistance.”
Still others were reported to have voluntarily shared delicate information with the Chinese, exercising “continuous contacts with Chinese nationals” and trying “to transfer large volumes of data from the Federal Reserve to an external site.”
According to the report, at least one member of the network was fired for “violating certain [Federal Reserve System] rules,” according to the Committee.
The Senate Committee lambasted the Federal Reserve for its lack of response, suggesting that their findings revealed a “lack of internal counterintelligence competency at the Federal Reserve or sufficient ongoing cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell lamented the Committee’s findings, penning a letter to Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, to express his frustration.
“We would be concerned with any supportable allegation of wrongdoing, whatever the source,” Powell wrote. “In contrast, we are deeply troubled by what we believe to be the report’s unfair, unsubstantiated and unverified insinuations about particular individual staff members.”
The report did not shed light on whether or not the Chinese were successful in their attempts to manipulate American policy.
