President Joe Biden’s choice for the Department of Commerce’s assistant secretary for export administration cleared a Huawei executive of fraud charges one day after her nomination hearing.
Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was previously charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud. However, Thea Kendler — who served on the Department of Justice team prosecuting Meng — agreed to let the Chinese telecommunications executive off the hook in September.
Fox Business reported:
Meng was released from Canadian custody in September after reaching a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ — an agreement Kendler signed one day after her Senate nomination hearing. A deferred prosecution agreement is a form of legal adjudication that eventually drops charges against a defendant should they fulfill their side of the bargain in the agreement…
The terms of Meng’s deferred prosecution agreement were light, however, only requiring the Chinese national charged with defrauding financial institutions to agree to a “four-page statement of facts that details the knowingly false statements” to one of the financial institutions in the case. The only other stipulation of Meng’s deal with the government was an agreement “not to commit other federal, state or local crimes.”
In a statement to Fox Business, a spokesman for Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said that the lawmaker “wants to understand the interagency process and negotiations with Communist China and others, including Thea Kendler’s role at the Justice Department, that led to the deferred prosecution agreement …”
Huawei — a Chinese technology company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party — has frequently provoked suspicion from Western governments. Former President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission once designated Huawei as a national security threat, and cut it off from subsidies, according to The New York Times:
The agency voted unanimously [in 2019] to bar telecommunications manufacturers it deemed to be threats from receiving money meant to expand internet access to underserved areas, including rural America. The announcement on Tuesday was the final step in blocking Huawei and ZTE from the funds.
The Trump administration has been applying pressure on Chinese companies over security concerns. American officials have pushed countries around the world not to use Huawei’s networking equipment in their next-generation, or 5G, wireless networks.
As The Daily Wire’s Ian Haworth argued earlier this year, the United States should not be subsidizing Chinese entities, given that the communist nation is “today’s Nazi Germany.”
“Whether it be the CCP’s open disdain for human rights, their military aggression against neighboring states, or the attempt to place the world economy in a stranglehold, China’s status as the United States’ greatest adversary — both economically, militarily, and ethically — is unquestionable,” said Haworth. “The claim that Chinese institutions are in any way independent of the Chinese Communist Party is either naive or deeply moronic. In the world’s foremost dictatorship, we can safely assume any and all companies, organizations, and institutions exist only with the CCP’s blessing.”
