President Biden’s newest National Economic Council (NEC) hire is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher who spoke at a Chinese government-backed conference alongside a fellow professor recently indicted by the Department of Justice for secretly advising Chinese Communist Party officials. The conference was part of a broader relationship between MIT and Shanghai which includes a Chinese Communist Party district government paying for technological advice and has been praised by apparatchiks as helping achieve Xi Jinping’s goals for China’s technological development. The hire—Elisabeth Reynolds—spoke at the 2017 MIT China Conference in Shanghai. In addition to Chinese Communist Party officials speaking at
Top U.S. Intelligence official briefed lawmakers that foreign influence campaigns, chiefly at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party were “more expansive than previously known,” according to reports from The Hill. While Russia and Iran were also named, the Chinese Communist Party was identified as the chief aggressor: “Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe led intelligence officials in separately briefing the House and Senate Intelligence panels behind closed doors on the threats, informing lawmakers that the burgeoning foreign influence threat is being perpetrated by the usual suspects: China, Russia and Iran, though he indicated that Beijing was the primary aggressor.