Don Blankenship released the attached excerpt and comments so that concerned Americans can understand one of the many actual reasons Senator McConnell is opposing his candidacy for U.S. Senate:
Senator McConnell is not only a Swamper – he is the Swamp Captain. His conflicted and anti-American positions are helping to bankrupt our country.
Senator McConnell may also be assisting the Swamp in the cover-up of the government’s killing of twenty-nine coal miners. The facts surrounding the death of the miners clearly show a cover-up. The government required the miners to cut their airflow in half. A cut in the air which was completed just eight hours before the mine exploded.
Afterward, President Obama and his Chief Coal Mine Regulator immediately declared mine management – and the deceased miners – to be at fault. The transparent cover-up has continued now for over eight years and not a single U.S. Senator has said a word about destroyed documents, missing emails, gross prosecutorial misconduct. No U.S. Senator has called this what it was – a fake, politically driven trial.
Americans are watching their country be torn apart for the financial and political benefit of Schumer, Pelosi, McConnell, and others. Lies, conflicts of interest, and corruption have reached a new pinnacle. There is seemingly no limit to what our Congress will do to maintain the Swamp.
My run for the U.S. Senate offers voters an opportunity to begin draining the Swamp—this is why McConnell and the establishment are spending millions to defeat me. You would think they could do better than saying I am “contemptible” or “mentally ill.” Their comments read more like Facebook posts by the near-illiterate than comments from men who are allegedly representing America, the greatest country on earth.
As Schweizer tells it, the Chao family fortune derives from the Foremost Group, a shipping company that Chinese native James Chao, a classmate of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin at Jiao Tong University, founded in New York in 1964. Chao remains Foremost’s chairman today, and his daughters Angela and Christine are the company’s deputy chairwoman and general counsel, respectively. Elaine Chao worked there in the 1970s, and has been quoted as saying, “Shipping is our family tradition.”
The success of Foremost is largely due to its close ties to the Chinese government, in particular the China State Shipbuilding Corp. (CSSC), a corporation with which Foremost has done “large volumes of business.”
Modal Trigg
The CSSC, Schweizer writes, is “a state-owned defense conglomerate … at the heart of the Chinese government’s military-industrial complex.” The main goal of the CSSC is to strengthen the Chinese military. James and Angela Chao have both sat on the board of a CSSC offshoot.
While Foremost is an American company, “their ships have been constructed by Chinese government shipyards, and some of their construction financed by the Chinese government.” In addition, writes Schweizer, “their crews are largely Chinese,” despite US Transportation Secretary and company founder’s daughter Elaine Chao having once said that “ships crewed by Americans are ‘a vital part of our national security.’”
Given all this, it’s worth noting how both McConnell and Chao, in their roles as high-ranking US officials, have personally interacted with, and then gone considerably soft on, China since their 1993 wedding.
When Senator McConnell — who took hardline positions against China prior to his marriage — met with high-ranking Chinese officials in 1994, it was not in his capacity as senator, but via a personal invitation from the CSSC arranged by James Chao. McConnell met with Zemin, then the country’s president, and vice-premiere Li Lanqing. After this meeting, McConnell “would increasingly avoid public criticism of China.” More meetings like it would follow in the years to come.
“As the Chaos and the Chinese government went into business together, the Chaos-McConnells tied their economic fate to the good fortunes of Beijing,” Schweizer writes. “Were McConnell to critique Beijing aggressively or support policies damaging to Chinese interests, Beijing could severely damage the family’s economic fortunes.”
In the ensuing years, McConnell has loudly defended China in its actions against Hong Kong and Taiwan, even claiming that “the United States needed to be ‘ambiguous’ as to whether we would come to the defense of Taiwan if attacked by China.” When Sen. Jesse Helms introduced the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, pledging support for Taiwanese independence, in 1999, it had “twenty-one co-sponsors and heavy Republican support. But McConnell was not on the list.”
When Congress required China to document annual progress on human rights in order to maintain its trade status in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, ditching the requirement became a priority for the country. In 2000, “McConnell cosponsored S.2277, which would do just that.”