Since March 2021, William Burns has led the Central Intelligence Agency. Despite partisan divides on foreign policy, Burns' nomination received bipartisan praise and no one questioned his credentials.
Burns came to Langley with a truly impressive CV, including 32 years as a career diplomat and seven as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But behind the scenes at this elite policy institute lie a potentially explosive scandal. Carnegie employed at least 20 Chinese Communist Party members during Burns' time as president. Including four who were hired under his watch.
The Daily Caller reports:
Yet, expert profiles on Carnegie's website don't disclose these individuals' ties to the CCP. The DCNF only discovered their communist ties after analyzing hundreds of Chinese-language, Communist Party branch records and personnel profiles from more than a dozen CCP-linked organizations.
Burns' tenure at Carnegie coincided with increased alarm from the FBI concerning the CCP conducting “malign influence operations” against key American institutions. In July 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that the CCP seeks to “influence our policymakers” and “manipulate our public opinion” by exploiting the “openness” of our society.
Considering such warnings, employing CCP members and those with Chinese government ties raises red flags, national security experts said.
…
CCP members swear an oath to the Communist Party pledging to “fight for communism” and “sacrifice everything for the party and the people,” according to the Constitution of the Communist Party of China. Moreover, in keeping with China's “Thousand Grains of Sand” intelligence-gathering strategy, Chinese intelligence often recruits members of the overseas Chinese community to collect information for the state, according to the CIA.
NPR reported that Burns sounded more like a general than a diplomat at a confirmation hearing in February where he bluntly listed the growing challenges posed by China and its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping.
Democrats and Republicans alike praised him for his tough talk and ability to differentiate the threat China presented from that of the old Soviet Union. Although Burns noted that most of his white hair came from his time serving as U.S. Ambassador to Russia. “What I've learned is that it's always a mistake to underestimate Putin's Russia,” he told the Senate Intelligence Community.
Burns was approved with unanimous consent after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) rescinded a hold on his nomination. Cruz had hoped to pressure the Biden administration to issue sanctions against Russia, preventing the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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