Remember when we were told that TikTok was not a Chinese Communist company by all the people it had bribed?
Remember when we were told that it had nothing to do with the Chinese Communist regime?
It was all lies. And if you still don’t believe me, believe the CCP which is now lobbying Congress.
The meetings with Hill staff were initiated by the Chinese Embassy in outreach that did not initially mention TikTok, according to the congressional staffers, one of whom worked for the House and the other for the Senate, and who were granted anonymity to discuss conversations that they were not authorized to reveal publicly. The meetings, which took place with Chinese diplomats, were held after the House in March overwhelmingly voted in favor of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the legislation that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok.
Additionally, in a separate phone call to set up a meeting, an embassy official said that the Chinese ambassador was interested in discussing, among other matters, the House’s TikTok bill, according to a third staffer, a Democratic Senate aide who was approached.
The embassy downplayed the national security concerns with TikTok in both meetings, the two staffers said, and sought to align the app with American interests: In one meeting, the embassy said a ban on TikTok would harm U.S. investors who hold some ownership in ByteDance. In the other, the embassy emphasized that not all ByteDance board members were Chinese nationals.
The embassy also sought to claim the company as Chinese, the staffers said, despite TikTok’s public efforts to distance itself from the origin of its founders. TikTok, unlike ByteDance, is based in Singapore and the United States. In one of the meetings, the embassy argued that the legislation amounted to a forced data transfer of a Chinese company, according to the House staffer. In the other, the embassy argued that the effort was not fair to a Chinese company because the U.S. would not treat a company with a different national origin the same way, according to the Senate staffer.
It’s outrageous enough that members of Congress were allowing themselves to be lobbied by an enemy nation, but they were holding secret meetings with emissaries from that nation on top of that.
If there’s any ambiguity about the fact that TikTok is a Chinese Communist regime asset, that’s done.
It’s time for defenders of TikTok to stop lying and gaslighting about it. Their only argument is that some botched misinterpretation of the Bill of Rights allows China to control the 2024 election. (It does not.)
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
