CCP SPY $$$ SPIGOT EXPOSED: How a U.S. Visa Program Designed by a Chinese Spy Lets Beijing Funnel Money into American Elections

Peter Schweizer’s new book The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon details how a seemingly innocuous program to entice foreign investors became a massive operation for laundering foreign donations to American politicians, primarily Democrats.

The plot revolved around a program established by the 1990 Immigration Act called the Employment-Based Fifth Preference (EB-5) visa. It was ostensibly intended to encourage foreign investors to put big money into American business and job creation.

Foreigners who invested at least $1.05 million (or $800,000 in certain economically-distressed areas) and created at least ten American jobs were issued a green card and permanent resident status. Applicants under this fast-tracked program were subjected to very little scrutiny.

In practice, the EB-5 program became a gateway to outrageous levels of foreign interference in American politics, and there are good reasons to believe it was designed that way from its inception.

All of those people became central figures in the Clinton-China fundraising scandal in 1996. A Senate investigation named Hsia as an “agent of the Chinese government” who sought to conceal her ties to Beijing while funneling money to the Clintons and their allies. The Lippo Group used the EB-5 visa as a battering ram to smash through America’s defenses against foreign campaign contributions.

John Huang pled guilty to a felony conspiracy charge of violating campaign finance laws in 1999. James Riady, son of Lippo Group founder Mochtar Riady, pled guilty in 2001 to conspiracy charges related to illegal campaign contributions to Democrats during the 1996 elections. The Democrat Party ended up returning over a million dollars’ worth of tainted campaign cash.

For anyone who lived through the Clinton scandals, seeing all of these names pop up in Schweizer’s history of the EB-5 visa is like discovering that a slumber party was planned by Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers. Of course it was a sinister plot, and of course it became a bloody disaster.

Schweizer quoted investigators who believe the EB-5 was custom-built by Hsia and the Lippo Group for the express purpose of getting foreign money into Democrat political coffers, with a few donations to Republicans on the side.

The scheme was elegant in its simplicity: flood the United States with foreign operatives who could funnel campaign money to Democrats, even though they were not eligible to vote in American elections.

Schweizer presents the case study of Danhong “Jean” Chen, a Chinese citizen who obtained permanent resident status in the United States, ran a company dedicated to helping foreign investors obtain EB-5 visas, raked in $52 million in income from the operation, and pumped $294,300 into Democrat campaigns — plus another $449,052 donated by mysterious individuals who used the address of her law firm.

Chen and her husband Jianyun “Tony” Lee were eventually indicted for visa fraud and identity theft. Ye went to jail, Chen fled the U.S. but was later arrested in the Kyrgyz Republic, and to this day nobody knows who their mysterious army of small donors were.

EB-5 operations like Chen’s openly told foreign clients they would gain access to the American political system as donors, even though they could not vote, and marketed their ability to arrange meetings with prominent U.S. political figures — including, in one example from 2017, President Donald Trump.

The EB-5 companies touted their ability to magically legalize campaign donations to American politicians, and some were not shy about portraying these donations as bribes to foreign clients who viewed bribing officials as a common business practice.

The vast majority of these clients came from China, and as Schweizer points out, there is no reason to believe they were not operating under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which is very interested in developing networks to influence the politics of the United States and other Western nations.

Thus did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suddenly find herself awash in mysterious thousand-dollar donations from New York City’s Chinatown during her failed 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential primary. Quite a few of her thousand-dollar donors listed their addresses as “dirty tenements with paint peeling from the walls and trash bins in front.”

Subsequent investigations found that many of these Chinese donors were following explicit instructions to support Clinton from suspicious “neighborhood associations.” Some of those community groups were in turn linked to the United Front Work Department, China’s subversive agency for spreading Communist ideology around the world.

Schweizer found it telling that the authoritarian Chinese government permits EB-5 recruiting firms to work unimpeded in China, even though it theoretically restricts its subjects from sending over $50,000 beyond China’s borders in any given year — and EB-5 visas require minimum investments on American soil that far exceed that paltry amount. The EB-5 industry should be completely illegal in China — but it isn’t, because it helps China influence American politics, and gain access to sensitive infrastructure projects in the United States.

Invisible Coup explains how the EB-5 visa program — designed by operators with links to the Chinese Communist Party and foisted on the American people as a job-creating program over three decades ago — gave China a vast arsenal of small-caliber political weapons that could fire endless volleys of untraceable donations into our elections.

Schweizer’s The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon is published by HarperCollins and is available to purchase now.