EXCLUSIVE — Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) is leading a group of House Republicans in a letter calling for the intelligence community to give answers regarding the Chinese Communist Party’s “wealth and corrupt activities.”
In the letter directed at Director of National Intelligence Chairwoman Avril D. Haines and shared with the Washington Examiner, the lawmakers say the intelligence community is eight months late after Congress gave it a year to complete a report on China’s top leaders’s wealth.
“It is beyond unacceptable that Director Haines has failed to produce a completed report regarding the corruption of the genocidal CCP,” Ogles told the Washington Examiner. “Nearly 21 months later, members of Congress are still awaiting information that would undermine Communist China’s evil regime. Why is the director of national intelligence unable to comply with a simple congressional request? It is a great concern to me and several of my colleagues that we have yet to receive an update on a critically important delayed report from our intelligence community.”
Reps. Pat Fallon (R-TX), Barry Moore (R-AL), John Rose (R-TN), Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), and Clay Higgins (R-LA) co-signed the letter.
The letter argues that there’s benefit to a more in-depth analysis of Chinese leaders’s wealth given the information revealed already. A Bloomberg News investigation estimated Chinese President Xi Jinping’s hidden wealth to be just over $707 million despite a public salary of $22,256 a year.
“The eventual publishing of this report will likely reveal that numerous top Chinese Communist Party officials are bona fide billionaires, with wealth stored around the world,” the letter says. “The report may also raise questions within China as to how people like Xi Jinping — who rakes in an annualized salary on par with D.C. House interns — could have amassed huge sums of cash, given that leadership salaries are largely nominal and intended to demonstrate sacrifice and solidarity with the Chinese working class.”
An investigation could also reveal how the leaders are delivering for China’s people given they face a “persistent collapse in consumer confidence, with consumer confidence contributing to less than half of all economic growth,” the letter says.
“The credibility of the Chinese Communist Party as an institution reflecting the interests of the Chinese people and the ability to burnish economic success is waning, and while the Chinese economy remains in doldrums, the United States must take the opportunity to highlight the hypocrisy of the CCP’s leadership,” the letter continued.
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The letter gives the Office of the Director of National Intelligence two weeks to respond to the letter “detailing to us the progress the IC has made thus far in compiling this report, as well as how much longer the IC anticipates a finished product will take.”
A European Journal of Political Economy study of officials found guilty of corruption in China from 2012 to 2021 showed the amount of “corruption is positively associated with education, administrative level of the official, and years of membership in the Communist Party.”
