Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) took aim at pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy during Wednesday night’s second Republican Party primary debate over his past business ties to communist China.
Scott’s attack comes after he was overshadowed and largely quiet during the first Republican Party primary debate last month and has hovered around 2-3% in the polls, according to the RealClearPolitics average.
Scott took issue with Ramaswamy for saying during the debate that all the Republican candidates on stage were good people after he had accused them during the first debate of being “bought and paid for.”
“When we have a conversation about the things that are happening on this stage, we think about the fact that Vivek just said we were all ‘good people,’ and I appreciate that,” Scott said. “Because last debate, he said we were all ‘bought and paid for.'”
“And I thought about that for a little while, and said, you know, I can’t imagine how you could say that, knowing that you were just in business with the Chinese Communist Party, and the same people that funded Hunter Biden millions of dollars was a partner of yours as well,” Scott said.
WATCH:
Tim Scott blasts Vivek Ramaswamy for doing business with the Chinese Communist Party:
"I can't imagine how you can say that knowing that you were just in business with the Chinese Communist Party."#GOPDebate pic.twitter.com/PyPqlCGrWM
— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) September 28, 2023
Ramaswamy said that Scott’s claims were “nonsense.”
An op-ed in The Washington Post this week noted that Ramaswamy did business with “high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party, including the same CCP-linked family that paid millions to Hunter Biden.”
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Ramaswamy’s pharmaceutical company, Roivant, partnered with a “private-equity arm of CITIC Group, a state-owned Chinese investment firm, to form a company called Sinovant, focused on ‘bringing innovative medicines to China and advancing Chinese biopharmaceutical innovation abroad,'” the Post reported.
The New York Times reported that CITIC Group is “embedded in the Communist Party elite” and is “an important member of the government-controlled ‘national team’ that carries out the will of the state in financial markets.”
The 2014 deal was between Ramaswamy’s company and CITIC’s private-equity firm (CITIC PE), which “is led by Liu Lefei, son of Liu Yunshan, who is the former head of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department,” the report said. Liu Lefei is also married to Jia Liqing, who is the daughter of China’s longest-serving minister of state security, and the Times noted that the two represent “the most potent arms of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Jia also “co-founded Harvest Global Investments with Zhao Xuejun (a.k.a. Henry Zhao), a company that went into business with Hunter Biden,” the Washington Post report states. “Zhao paid $5 million to Biden’s firm Burnham Asset Management in 2016, which emails from Biden’s laptop confirm. Think of what that means: Ramaswamy was in business with the same family as the president’s son, whose Chinese business interests House Republicans are now investigating.”