Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff’s CCP-Linked Payment ‘Oversight’ Explanation Evolves After Ethics Complaint

ATLANTA — Georgia Democrat Senate candidate Jon Ossoff has provided more detail about a payment his film company received from a company linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) following the Georgia GOP filing an ethics complaint against Ossoff over the payment.

After a political ad revealed in November that Ossoff failed to list a payment his film company, Insight TWI, received from the Hong Kong-based PCCW Media Limited on his May financial disclosure — and then later amended his filings to include the payment — the Georgia GOP submitted a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee over the matter.

As Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong reported, PCCW is owned by China Unicom, which is run by CEO Wang Xiaochu, a member of the CCP, and is also owned by Richard Li, who has openly opposed Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.

Ossoff’s campaign said he was not hiding the payment and attributed the omission to a “paperwork oversight” caught during a “normal review.”

Now, according to a December 9 report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ossoff’s campaign has updated its explanation, saying the dollar amount received from PCCW was “around $1,000,” a detail that conflicts with the Senate filling requirement to disclose payments that are more than $5,000.

“Though the payments were below the $5,000 reporting threshold, the [Ossoff] campaign said the sums were disclosed in the interest of transparency,” the AJC reported.

Breitbart News asked the Ossoff campaign about the payment disclosure discrepancy and if Ossoff had proof of the claimed amount of $1,000 but did not receive a response.

The Ossoff campaign’s explanation to the AJC comes after the Georgia GOP submitted a complaint on December 8 requesting the Senate Ethics Committee investigate if Ossoff “knowingly and willfully” failed to list the payment on his May filing, charging that the omission may have benefitted Ossoff in his June Senate primary.

Ossoff’s campaign said to the AJC that the complaint was “utterly false and desperate.”

Ossoff is now facing Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) in the upcoming Senate runoff election. Perdue’s campaign said the new detail about the amount Ossoff’s company received from PCCW creates skepticism and that Ossoff should provide proof of the amount.

“Jon Ossoff’s shifting explanations for his relationship to the Chinese communist government raise even more questions for the scandal-plagued candidate,” Perdue spokesman John Burke said, adding that “Ossoff must provide evidence of exactly how much money he and his company received from PCCW. If the amount is actually under the $5,000 threshold, this should be easy for him to do.”

Ossoff’s filings show the Georgia Democrat also omitted a handful of other payments from his May statement, including one from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network. Presumably, the other payments that were omitted were over $5,000, per the filing instruction, but Ossoff’s recent claim about the amount of the PCCW payment being $1,000 indicates this may not be the case.

Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com.