A think-tank expert who urged a primarily cooperative relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and North Korea now handles the State Department’s outreach to Congress on Indo-Pacific issues, a source familiar with the situation told National Review.
Jessica Lee, a former research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, recently joined State’s legislative-affairs bureau, as NR reported on Monday. Although she had been appointed to the role of “senior advisor,” the exact details of her assignment had been unclear.
The source said that Lee has been specifically tasked with engaging House lawmakers on issues relating to State’s bureau for East Asia and the Pacific. Prior to entering the think-tank world, Lee was a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Notably, the Biden administration appointee’s new assignment resembles her previous efforts, while at the Quincy Institute, to engage Congress. Last year, Lee played a key role in the think tank’s campaign to weaken the Strategic Competition Act, which it warned would be seen as a “declaration of a Cold War on China.”
In a May 2021 essay co-authored with another former Quincy Institute scholar, Rachel Esplin Odell — who also left the think tank to work at State — Lee cautioned that the U.S. government’s warnings about Chinese Communist Party “malign influence” stoked discourse that is “alarmist in nature and could exacerbate McCarthyist attacks against Asian Americans.” Specifically, Lee and Odell warned that criticizing individuals and organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party for those ties is unnecessary and harms U.S. national security.
They urged Congress to kill provisions of the Strategic Competition Act that would have allocated $300 million to a “Countering Chinese Influence Fund,” asked the president to “protect our democratic institutions and processes from malign influence from the People’s Republic of China,” and directed $100 million to the U.S. Agency for Global Media for the purposes of countering Chinese disinformation.
In a separate essay on the Strategic Competition Act, Lee bashed a provision endorsing sanctions targeting the North Korean regime. “In general, a more restrained posture that creates space for diplomacy with North Korea, rather than the threat of broad, indiscriminate sanctions, would better promote U.S. interests in a stable Korean Peninsula,” she wrote.
Progressive House lawmakers appeared to have taken stances similar to those Lee advocated in her work on the Strategic Competition Act. Representative Sara Jacobs (D., Calif.) urged her colleagues to oppose similar provisions on CCP malign influence and North Korea when the House considered the China package earlier this year.
When Congress passed the overall package that began with the Strategic Competition Act this year, none of those provisions were included in the final bill, and it’s not clear why they were excluded.
Separately, during an October 2021 webinar, Lee claimed that she had convinced the State Department to move away from its use of the phrase “malign influence” when referring to Beijing’s behavior.