The mayor of a Los Angeles County city has resigned and admitted to acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party. GAI Director of Research Seamus Bruner says the case is far from an isolated incident.
“The mayor, Irene Wang, has been working at the direction of CCP operatives,” Bruner said. “They ran this website where she would post all kinds of pro-CCP messaging. There’s no genocide in Xinjiang. All kinds of stuff. Like the CCP is not a brutal regime. And then she would respond to her — I guess, effectively — CCP handlers saying ‘it is done, you know, thank you, leader.’ Clearly at the direction.”
Bruner drew a legal distinction that explains why the case crossed into federal criminal territory.
“If she were just merely saying pro-CCP messages, I guess that would be protected as free speech. However, this obviously crosses a line where you’re taking directions from a foreign adversary like China,” Bruner says.
He also raised questions about the timeline of federal action, noting that Wang’s own fiancé had been indicted two years earlier for the same activity: acting as a foreign agent of the CCP.
“I have a question about why that didn’t happen sooner,” Bruner says.
But the Arcadia case, in Bruner’s telling, is a window into something much larger.
“It also makes me wonder what the heck’s going on in California,” he says. “You have so many Chinese spies, CCP agents, infiltrating the highest levels. It goes up to the governor’s office.”
Bruner pointed to a series of well-documented examples: Senator Dianne Feinstein’s chauffeur, who Bruner said was a CCP spy working for her for over a decade; Rep. Eric Swalwell’s scandal involving suspected spy Christine “Fang Fang” Fang; and what Bruner described as approximately $31 million in payments to the Biden family from individuals linked to the highest levels of CCP intelligence.
He also flagged what he characterized as CCP infiltration of American universities.
“Whether it’s Harvard or the UPenn Biden Center in the University of Delaware — they both took millions of dollars from the CCP and then in return, sent out a letter, signed by faculty, saying that the Department of Justice needs to close investigations into CCP espionage and intellectual property theft in the university system,” he says.
Bruner noted that the CCP’s targeting isn’t limited to the upper echelons of power.
“They’re not just targeting the highest levels,” he said. “They’re going right down to the city council level.”
That point is underscored by a developing case in Maryland, which Bruner said follows the same pattern.
“There’s another case going on right now developing over in Maryland with a state delegate who’s been accused of acting on behalf of the CCP,” he says. “He’s proposing legislation in Maryland that says that no new data centers can be built without the AI companies disclosing and divulging all of their top proprietary corporate information.”
Bruner framed it as part of a deliberate, multi-front strategy.
“It runs the full spectrum of the types of things they’re trying to get done,” he says. “There are a number of items that are on the Chinese agenda for what they want American politicians to do.”
Listen to the clip above.
