‘I think it’s reasonable to assume that all of us in Congress, and our staffs, by the way, are targets for the MSS or targets of United Front work.’
The chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with China said that Beijing’s spies are likely targeting Congress.
“I think it’s reasonable to assume that all of us in Congress, and our staffs, by the way, are targets for the MSS or targets of United Front work, and we need to be aware of that fact and cognizant of it,” Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), the panel’s chairman, said today, referring to China’s Ministry of State Security spy agency and the United Front Work Department. This powerful Chinese Communist Party bureau works to influence non-party members in China and across the world.
He added that while every member of Congress receives a security clearance, “not everyone that works on Capitol Hill has a security clearance” and that there’s a conflict between the need to get people through the clearance process quickly and the thoroughness of the vetting they receive.
Gallagher made the comments during a press conference at the June 4th Memorial Museum in Manhattan and was responding to National Review’s question about an espionage scandal roiling the U.K. parliament.
Over the weekend, British outlets reported that the U.K. authorities had arrested two men in March under the country’s Official Secrets Act, allegedly for acting as spies for China.
The Times U.K. reported that one of the two men, Chris Cash, was a researcher for the China Research Group, an influential China policy-focused office in parliament. Cash denied the allegations in a statement through his lawyer Monday, saying that he is “completely innocent.”
Gallagher, also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he hasn’t yet had the chance to access classified information about the matter because Congress just returned from recess.
“I don’t know if he had access to classified information. I know he was part of an influential kind of quasi-think tank nestled within the foreign affairs committee, which is troubling,” he said, adding that he doesn’t know what sort of vetting procedures the U.K. parliament has in place.
The news about Cash came as some Conservative MPs have criticized the government of prime minister Rishi Sunak for declining to label Beijing a threat and sending foreign minister James Cleverly to China for talks with officials there. Addressing the House of Commons yesterday, MP Iain Duncan Smith accused Sunak’s government of ignoring warnings about the espionage threat from the U.K.’s security services.
Gallagher suggested it’s strange that “the MSS doesn’t occupy the same place in people’s imagination or minds than, let’s say, the KGB did.”
“It’s hard for people to truly understand that the scale and scope of Chinese espionage as a result, and because Hollywood is bought and paid for by China in many cases, like there’s no movies that put this into terms that people can understand,” he added.
Congress has seen its own share of scandals involving staffers’ proximity to the Chinese government. National Review exclusively reported last year that a congressional scheduler’s unauthorized work for the Chinese embassy in Washington had led to her dismissal. In 2018, Politico revealed that a California-based staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein had been recruited by Chinese intelligence officers.