U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who was a U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer serving seven years (2006–13) on active duty, is the chair of Congress’s new Select Committee on China. As Gallagher does battle against America’s top global rival, the Congressman may have to be careful — one of Gallagher’s top political donors, the Blackstone Group, does big business in China and has announced plans to do much more.
According to Gallagher, the first public hearing of the Select Committee held in February set out to “expose the [Chinese Communist Party]’s coordinated whole-of-society strategy to undermine American leadership and American sovereignty while working on a bipartisan basis … to identify long-overdue, commonsense approaches to counter CCP aggression.”
In August, Gallagher penned an op-ed piece for The Washington Post titled ‘Americans Are Unwittingly Financing the CCP. It Has To Stop.’
Gallagher wrote that while President Biden‘s executive order to have the Treasury Department issue rules to restrict some U.S. investment in Chinese companies working on artificial intelligence, semiconductors and quantum computing is “a good first step,” he added, “it should not be the last.”
“Countering CCP aggression” will require support outside of D.C., too, Gallagher asserts, saying “Wall Street needs to recognize that investments in malign Chinese firms create danger for our men and women in uniform” and that such investments pose “systemic risks for the global economy.”
Presumably, Gallagher’s warning to Wall Street includes Blackstone. Blackstone ranked third among corporate contributors to Gallagher’s coffers, giving $22,300 in 2021-22.
Last month, as Gallagher published his anti-China Washington Post op-ed, Blackstone — consistently among the world’s richest financial services companies — saw its new China unit receive “regulatory approval to raise funds that will be invested overseas, joining other global asset managers in seeking to tap Chinese investor demand for foreign assets.” (Note: This is largely a move to facilitate the ability to bring Chinese investor money out of China.)
On Wednesday, September 27, Gallagher will address how he’s “taking on U.S. investments in China” with Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on her show, Mornings with Maria.
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