Commerce Secretary Owns Stake in WeChat Parent Company as White House Reviews Trump’s Ban
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and her husband own a financial stake in WeChat parent company Tencent Holdings, even as the Commerce Department reviews a ban of the Chinese tech giant.
Raimondo and her husband Andrew Moffit own a stake in Tencent worth between $21,500 and $44,500, according to a financial disclosure filed Jan. 19 with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). The recently confirmed commerce secretary promised to divest from other financial positions, citing potential conflicts of interest but didn’t mention divesting the Tencent stake.
President Joe Biden’s administration is conducting a broad review of the previous administration’s outstanding executive orders related to China, including an August action that banned transactions with Tencent. Biden’s Justice Department asked an appeals court to pause a case concerning the ban in February while it reviews the acti
early on, we can’t think of one.
What’s not unexpected, however, but nonetheless thoroughly disgusting, is that officials within our own government were involved in it.
And one of the officials is a name readers will know well: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. epidemiologist who has been ‘less than honest’ with Americans about the coronavirus and its actual effects on humans throughout the pandemic.
“Judicial Watch announced today that it and the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) received 301 pages of emails and other records of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. H. Clifford Lane from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showing that National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials tailored confidentiality forms to China’s terms and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased, ‘strictly confidential’ COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020,” the legal organization said in news release posted to its website.
The World Health Organization has delayed reporting its findings from its investigation in Wuhan, China, amid growing criticism from the scientific community. Pictured: WHO headquarters in Geneva Aug. 17, 2020. (Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
The World Health Organization team that announced in February it was “extremely unlikely” that COVID-19 could have accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab has scrapped previously announced plans to release an interim report on its findings.
WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic told The Daily Caller News Foundation Feb. 10 that the report would be released “in coming days,” but the team’s lead researcher, Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, told The Wall Street Journal Thursday that WHO will not release an interim report and will instead publish a comprehensive report “in coming weeks and will include key findings.”
A private prison is struggling to find facilities to take in nearly 800 inmates before its contract with the federal government expires in three months.