To Denny Rehberg, a former member of Congress seeking the Republican primary nomination in Montana’s deep-red 2nd Congressional District, China isn’t just a competitor of the United States. “It is our enemy,” he said earlier this month.
“I am sure Montanans agree that national security should be at the forefront of our negotiations with China,” Rehberg, who upon leaving the U.S. House in 2013 scored a co-chairman role at the high-powered Washington, D.C., lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs, told the Treasure State’s Billings Gazette newspaper in May.
There’s just one problem: Rehberg lobbied while at Mercury as a registered foreign agent for a Chinese state-owned video surveillance company, which was then sanctioned by the U.S. government.
The U.S. placed that same manufacturer, Hikvision, on a blacklist in 2020 banning U.S. citizens from investing in Chinese firms controlled or owned by China’s military. The Federal Communications Commission declared Hikvision to pose “an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security” and prohibited the sale or import in 2022 of Hikvision equipment in the U.S. And just last year, in 2023, the Biden administration added numerous Hikvision subsidiaries to a Commerce Department blacklist, which Hikvision itself was placed on in 2019, for entities said to be assisting China’s government in the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.
“I didn’t work for the Chinese government,” Rehberg, who reported on his 2024 candidate financial disclosure report that he and his spouse held up to $7.9 million in assets, told the Washington Examiner. He is no longer with Mercury, said a source close to the firm, which did not respond to questions about Hikvision.
Rehberg is running in the 2024 House primary against Montana state auditor Troy Downing, who notched 38% support to Rehberg’s 26% in an April poll among likely voters, as well as Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen. The winner of the June 4 primary will almost certainly win the general election in the district, which in 2020 swung for former President Donald Trump by nearly 27 percentage points.
Rehberg, in an interview with the Washington Examiner, said at Mercury he “was asked to look into a relationship” between Hikvision and the National Franchise Association for issues related to surveillance cameras in U.S. restaurants and grocery stores.
“There was nothing nefarious,” Rehberg said. Asked about the U.S. sanctions and if he stands by registering as a foreign agent for Hikvision, Rehberg claimed he “has no knowledge or idea of what happened” in China.
Still, records on file with the Department of Justice show Rehberg in 2019 contacted then-top Commerce Department official Peter Krug in connection to possible agency “actions against Hikvision.” His Mercury lobbyist colleagues, DOJ filings show, also reached out to both the State Department about “the “Hikvision Xinjiang issue” and Congress about the status of legislation aiming to address surveillance technology in Xinjiang.
“Why aren’t you covering Guatemala, Ecuador, Ethiopia, all the other countries that are coming across the border? See, you’re narrowing in on China. I don’t have the luxury that you have of separating issues because I represented the entire state of Montana,” Rehberg, an ex-GOP Montana congressman from 2001 to 2013, said. “I didn’t have the luxury you have of dividing your mind into China. I just didn’t. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get to.”
On his 2024 candidate financial disclosure, Rehberg said in the preceding year, he was paid on retainer by Mercury, which over the years has represented foreign governments such as Qatar, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Mercury just recently registered to lobby for International Crisis Group, a global think tank connected to an Iranian government-controlled influence network.
In August 2018, Rehberg submitted a signed filing to the DOJ reporting himself as a foreign agent for Hikvision USA. Rehberg, he told the U.S. government, would focus on consulting, lobbying, government relations, public affairs, and outreach to U.S. officials.
Hikvision, which is based in Hangzhou, China, has reportedly partnered with the Chinese Communist Party in surveilling Uyghurs and mosques. A report in June 2022, based on internal documents, found that Hikvision’s cameras were used by Chinese police to track and detain Uyghurs for “immediate arrest.” The State Department determined in 2021 that China has committed genocide against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.
Separate documents filed in 2021 with the DOJ say Rehberg set up meetings with congressional offices in 2018 on behalf of Hikvision USA President Jeffrey He. The meetings, Rehberg told the Washington Examiner, “were about working with the Trump administration to help various small businesses in America through the issue of Hikvision having various cameras in restaurants.”
Still, in those same DOJ filings for 2018, Mercury said its work for Hikvision was “specifically concerning provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act.” That year, the annual defense bill signed by Congress included a ban on U.S. agencies from doing business with Hikvision, as well as other Chinese companies, over national security concerns.
“It takes a certain level of shamelessness to lobby the U.S. Congress on behalf of a CCP company linked to genocide, then run for a seat in the House of Representatives,” Michael Sobolik, a China expert and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said.
Hikvision counts its largest shareholder as China Electronics Technology Group, a state-owned corporation formed in 2002 by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, according to 2023 Hikvision financial disclosures. The records list Hikvision as having other state-owned shareholders, including the Beijing-based Central Huijin Investment Company and CETC Investment Holdings.
“Representing the interests of Hikvision, a company that has aided and abetted Beijing’s attempts to destroy the Uyghur people, displays a profound lack of moral judgment and should disqualify anyone from public service in the United States of America,” Sobolik, author of Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance, added.
One person who has been personally affected by China’s human rights violations against Uyghurs, Rushan Abbas, said it’s “extremely disappointing” that Rehberg and Mercury have prioritized “profit from China’s blood money over human rights and human dignity.”
“It’s very disturbing,” Abbas, a Uyghur American who leads a group called Campaign for Uyghurs, said.
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Abbas has a sister named Dr. Gulshan Abbas who, in 2018, was detained by China’s government in Xinjiang.
“Unless he denounces or publicly apologizes for what he did, he should not be elected to represent the American people,” Rushan Abbas told the Washington Examiner.
