Did a small number of Fifth Column big donors sabotage the now flailing presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis? That’s a possible sub-plot behind the recent clipping of DeSantis’ budding China Hawk wings. The incident more broadly reveals a treasonous coterie of US billionaires and American lobbyists aiding and abetting Communist China’s dangerous rise.
It all started last May. To outflank the “Tough on China” Trump, Florida Governor DeSantis spearheaded passage of the Foreign Countries of Concern law in his state. That same month “DeSanctimonious,” as Donald Trump would soon be calling him, launched his presidential campaign.
DeSantis’ new Florida new law prevents Communist Chinese agents from buying property near US military bases. It also bans Chinese investment from funding projects in Florida.
It’s no state secret Communist China loves to buy land near our military bases to surveil these bases and intercept military intelligence. I saw plenty of unclassified intel about that in the White House.
Nor should the Communist Chinese be gobbling up America’s commercial and residential property as spoils of their economic aggression. China’s mercantilist manufacturers steal America’s intellectual property, flood our markets with unfairly subsidized goods, run up our trade deficit, and then recycle back our dollars into buying up America – while driving up rents and home prices for American citizens.
So, at first blush, the DeSantis bill does indeed seem like very Tough on China legislation. Yet, as always in politics, the devil is in the details.
Enter Stage Right, the apex Wall Street predator, billionaire Ken Griffin — one of the first big donors to hop on the DeSantis train. Yet, it would be Griffin who would successfully lead the lobbying charge to water down key portions of DeSantis’ now “weak on China” legislation. Moreover, to DeSantis’ humiliation, his own Chief of Staff carried the watering can with a proposed weakening rule change.
Griffin had no shortage of help in seeking to make Florida’s land safe for the business of Chinese spying and plundering. Front and center has been the DC Swamp-based Real Estate Roundtable — the lobbying hammer of big real estate investors ranging from Citigroup, Starwood, and Wells Fargo to another apex Wall Street predator in the Blackstone group’s CEO Steve Schwarzman.
Schwarzman is the biggest Chinese Communist Party sympathizer I ever had the displeasure to spar with in the West Wing. While constantly backchanneling the Chinese, Schwarzman lobbied against the Trump tariffs. He would later brag about his outsized influence on the January 2020 trade deal that China would of course renege on.
