by John Solomon
Review of foreign scientists from countries like China began even before three Chinese scientists in Michigan were caught trying to smuggle dangerous pathogens into U.S.
The Trump administration has secretly launched an intensive vetting process for hundreds of foreign scientists brought into the United States from "countries of concern" like China, using visas procured with the help of the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies, officials told Just the News.
The review involving intelligence and security agencies began weeks ago over concerns prior administrations did not adequately vet the backgrounds of scientists or their ties to actors like China's military or its Communist Party.
But the initiative has taken on additional urgency after three Chinese scientists were arrested in the last month trying to smuggle into America dangerous pathogens like fungi and roundworms capable of destroying crops.
An open door to scientific espionage
Officials told Just the News that as many as 1,000 scientists from countries of concern — a large number specifically from China — have been identified inside NIH alone, prompting a monstrous review by the agency's intelligence security office.
“The Trump administration is committed to safeguarding America’s
national and economic security. Taxpayer dollars should not and cannot
fund foreign espionage against America’s industrial base and research
apparatus," White House spokesman Kush Desai told Just the News.
The
rushed effort to vet scientists, especially from China, underscores the
laissez-faire screening of foreign researchers that prevailed during
the NIH’s leadership under Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, who
departed before Trump became president, officials said.
That lax
system persisted under Biden despite multiple warnings from the GAO of
the risks of undue foreign influence or theft of federal research.
GAO, the investigative and auditing arm of Congress, has issued more than a half-dozen reports in the last decade warning that NIH and other federal agencies and their surrogates inside universities lack the necessary safeguards to protect IP from foreign theft and research from foreign influence, especially with consultants or entities that work both for China and the United States.
“China is America’s top adversary, and foreign influence remains a key risk for the country’s national security,” a GAO report from last year pointedly warned. “DOD and DHS officials lack specific guidance on how acquisition personnel should collect information, assess, or mitigate potential national security risks when awarding contracts for consulting services.”
“U.S. research may be subject to undue foreign influence in cases where a researcher has a foreign conflict of interest,” the GAO added in a 2021 report that specifically highlighted vulnerabilities at the research universities that partner with NIH.
“…In the absence of agency-wide policies and definitions on non-financial interests, universities that receive federal grant funding may lack sufficient guidance to identify and manage conflicts appropriately, potentially increasing the risk of undue foreign influence,” the report added.
A Chinese scientist defects, blows the whistle
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist who defected to the United States in 2020 and alleged the COVID-19 virus was man-made, told Just the News that most scientists in her home country who win a visa to the United States sign contracts with the communist government of China to use their time in America for their home country’s benefit.
“The scientists getting visas from China to the US, they are visiting scholars, and they have signed the contract with Chinese government to go back to China, serve for China with whatever they can get from the U.S.,” Yan said in an exclusive interview with the Just the News, No Noise television show set to air Thursday night. “That's why they get visas from the Chinese government.
“So from the beginning, they already made a deal with the CCP and they become the CCPs’ kind of agents. So China has these people come here, grab your intellectual properties, grab your technologies, compromise your people, and they are like the tumor, like the parasites that go into your body,” she added.
Such warnings from defectors like Yan and the repeated audits by GAO have spurred members of Congress to become more determined than ever to work with the Trump administration to vastly upgrade vetting and lower the number of foreign scientists who get visas.
“The Chinese have been infiltrating our intellectual property, both covertly and on the surface for us to see. Yet we have sat back and allowed it to happen,” Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, told the John Solomon Reports podcast this week, “They've done it covertly through espionage and coming over and stealing certain trade secrets from business or military, but they've also done it above the board, right in front of our faces by infiltrating our universities with research and development grants.”
“We can't just let people do that and then see the Chinese take it from us and use it against us, and sit back and not do anything,” he added. “So we've got to strengthen our own systems from within, and we've got to push back in the trade world, in the tariff world and in the business practices world against China. That requires a strong executive, which we obviously have, and I think you're going to see that happen in the next three or four years.”
Several incidents contribute to urgency
Over the last month, three Chinese researchers who worked in Michigan have been arrested or charged by the FBI with smuggling pathogens illegally into the United States. Two were involved in the alleged smuggling of a toxic fungus and one brought in round worms, all pathogens that can harm American crops, officials said. The cases raised alarm about the potential for a new era of agroterrorism.
The ease with which Chinese doctors, scientists and professors, even outside the NIH's orbit, can enter the country and stay connected with Beijing's intelligence apparatus has been apparent for quite some time.
In September 2020, Hao Zhang, with his conspirators who were company employees, hatched a plan to start a business in China to compete with their employers based on stolen proprietary semiconductor design and processing blueprints.
Zhang was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $476,835 in restitution following his conviction at trial on charges of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. According to the Department of Justice, the scheme had begun as early as 2006.
In a curious and more recent case, the home of Xiaofeng Wang, a Chinese national and cybersecurity professor at Indiana University, was raided by the FBI in April of this year. According to The Guardian, Wang was never charged with a crime, but was summarily fired by Indiana University for reasons not made clear to the public, and his profile was removed from IU's website, although a screen capture shows his past connection to the state school. His whereabouts are at this time unknown.
Last year, the Biden administration implemented some new security procedures for federal research involving foreign countries, contractors or researchers, but it exempted those programs receiving less than $50 million in taxpayer funding. That left large numbers of visiting foreign scientists believed to have escaped a full vetting.
"It's a huge gap, and there is significant blindness to who some of these researchers were tied to overseas and what they are really working on," a senior U.S. official directly involved in the current review told Just the News. "The ongoing effort is enormously sensitive. It's labor-intensive. It involves the intel and law enforcement community. And it is essential to our security."
The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Service and NIH declined to provide Just the News precise numbers of scientists by country despite multiple requests, citing security concerns.
Around the time that the security vetting of foreign scientists quietly began, the Trump administration took another stark action: in April, the NIH told American researchers they could no longer direct federal tax dollars to foreign partners through sub-grants and secondary awards.
“If you can’t clearly justify why you are doing something overseas, as in it can’t possibly be done anywhere else and it benefits the American people, then the project should be closed down," Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, the NIH's deputy director, wrote the researchers, according to the New York Times.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration took another action, halting all clinical research trials that export Americans' cells to foreign labs in hostile countries for genetic engineering.
John Solomon
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/security/trump-administration-secretly-probing-hundreds-scientists-countries-concern
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