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.
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