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Under the radar clemency suggested a late deal by President Joe Biden in exchange for the release of convicted spies for the Chinese Communist Party.
Hunter Biden may have stolen the pardon show in advance of the resident-in-chief’s released list of 39 pardons and 1,499 commutations Thursday, but it was the timing of three other pardons that raised, ahem, red flags.
Detailed by the New York Post, on Nov. 22, the Friday before the week of Thanksgiving, Biden had signed off on the clemency of Xu Yanjun, Ji Chaoqun and Jin Shanlin.
The first two had been convicted of espionage for China while the third had been convicted of possession of child pornography when over 47,000 images were discovered in his possession while studying in Dallas, Texas as a doctoral student at Southern Methodist University.
Suggesting a quid pro quo, the Post went on to report, “Five days later, on November 27, the Chinese government released three Americans who were serving prison sentences in the Communist country: Mark Swidan, a businessman from Texas, who was arrested in 2012 and accused of drug related offenses; Kai Li, who had been held since 2016 on espionage charges; and John Leung, who was sentenced in 2023 to life in prison on spying charges.”
As for the individuals released by the Biden administration, in 2021, Xu, the Deputy Division Director of the Sixty Bureau of the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security, was faced with hefty fines and lengthy prison time for conspiring to commit economic espionage for the Chinese government, particularly targeting GE Aviation, and had been the first Chinese intelligence officer extradited to the United States.
Meanwhile, Ji, who had enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves in 2016, had been convicted in Oct. 2022 of acting as a foreign government agent working with Xu and China’s Ministry of State Security to spy on tech companies, earning an eight-year federal prison sentence.
Jin, who’d been sentenced to 97 months behind bars, five years of supervised release, and financial penalties, was said to be the relative of a high-ranking official of the CCP.
Following an administration fraught with foreign relation follies and a considerable number of Americans being held abroad, including hostages of Hamas who’d remained captives for well over a year, Biden’s decision to release the three Chinese prisoners came little more than a month after the House Committee on Homeland Security had released their “China Threat Snapshot” report detailing the illicit activities of the CCP in the United States under Biden’s watch.
Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) had said, “The Chinese Communist Party is not satisfied with destroying freedom and repressing its citizens within its own borders. Beijing has continually encroached upon Americans sovereignty to spy, intimidate, and harass not only defectors but even American citizens.”
The report made note of the influx of Chinese nationals through the porous border as at least 224 incidents of espionage from the communist nation had been accounted for between 2000 and 2023.
Amid concerns about Chinese police stations in the United States and allegations that New York Gov. Kath Hochul’s (D) former aide Linda Sun was working for the CCP, the same day that Biden had offered clemency to Chinese spies, South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds (R) had raised alarms about Chinese hackers.
“Any one of us and every one of us today is subject to the review by the Chinese Communist government of any cell phone conversation you have with anyone in America. Because they have access to every single one of our major telecommunications companies,” said Rounds. “They have broken in. They can read your texts, and they can hear your conversations. It’s just a matter of who they want to listen to and who they don’t.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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