The House Oversight Committee will finally get around to investigating why China seems so interested in the land around our U.S. Military bases.
(…we know why, but a probe will hopefully provide some much-needed transparency.)
Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) fired off a letter this week to the FBI and Department of Defense seeking answers to why so many Chinese agents are infiltrating our U.S. Military bases.
“The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is conducting oversight of how and to what extent foreign nationals are accessing U.S. military bases and facilities,” the pair wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “According to a recent report, Chinese nationals, sometimes posing as tourists, have repeatedly accessed, or attempted to access, U.S. military bases and other sensitive government facilities as often as one hundred times in recent years.”
“Posing as tourists.” Yep, we have disguise-type espionage going on here.
“These efforts to access U.S. military bases and facilities raise concerns about what these Chinese nationals are seeking to access and for what purpose,” they continued. “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has long used espionage as a tool to gain access to U.S. national security secrets. But the PRC’s efforts to spy on the United States has become more brazen in recent years.”
The letter also cites examples of suspicious activity like the massive amounts of land China is gobbling up around highly-classified areas, saying “these reports of Chinese espionage activities on U.S. soil underscore the Committee’s deepening concerns.”
“The varied nature of these incidents, from clandestine intelligence facilities to espionage balloons, suggests a multifaceted approach to intelligence gathering by the PRC,” they warned.
According to an NBC News report from earlier this year, “The Chinese firm Fufeng Group last year bought 370 acres for a corn-milling plant that would have been located about 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base. The planned $700 million plant would have created more than 200 direct jobs, according to local officials.”
The project was ultimately scrapped. Now, it’s up to Comer and Grothman to find out just how many of these close calls we’ve had —and how many of these espionage attacks were realized.
