Huawei paid Dem power broker Tony Podesta $1M to lobby Biden White House

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High-profile Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose firm collapsed under scrutiny during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, was paid $1 million by Huawei in 2021 as Beijing sought to soften the Biden administration’s position on the Chinese telecommunications giant.

Huawei appears to have hired Podesta effective as of July, with Senate lobbying disclosure forms showing he agreed to work for Huawei Technologies USA to lobby on “issues related to telecommunication services and impacted trade issues.” An October filing showed that the Chinese company paid Podesta $500,000 for the third quarter of 2021, and a filing this week showed he was paid another $500,000 in the fourth quarter. One filing said he was specifically lobbying the “White House Office,” while the other similarly said he was targeting the “Executive Office of the President.”


Huawei, previously deemed a national security threat, ramped up its influence efforts in the United States last year, with Senate lobbying disclosures showing it spent more than $3.59 on that in 2021. OpenSecrets says Huawei spent $2.985 million on lobbying in 2019 and $470,000 in 2020.

Tony Podesta is the brother of John Podesta, a former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, chairman of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, and current head of the left-wing Center for American Progress. John Podesta is close to members of the Biden administration.

When asked about Tony Podesta’s lobbying in October, a White House official said, “President Biden and this administration believe digital infrastructure equipment made by untrustworthy vendors, like Huawei, pose a threat to the security of the U.S., our allies, and our partners.”

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Alan Estevez, Biden’s pick for undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, told the Senate, “I believe that Huawei poses a national security threat to the United States. … I do not see a reason to remove Huawei from the Entity List.”

The Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Huawei and other Chinese companies are working hand in hand with the ruling Communist Party, potentially giving China‘s surveillance state access to hardware and networks around the world.

The Federal Communications Commission designated Huawei as a national security threat in the summer of 2020.

The Department of Commerce explained in December 2020 that Huawei was added to the entity list in May 2019 because the company and its affiliates “engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests.”

The Justice Department unveiled a superseding indictment of previous 2019 charges against Huawei in February 2020, charging it with racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, was arrested by Canadian authorities in December 2018 at the request of the U.S., indicted in the Eastern District of New York in January 2019, and charged with bank fraud and wire fraud as well as conspiracy to commit both. But the Biden Justice Department announced in September that they had entered into a “deferred prosecution agreement” with her and allowed her to return to China.

Podesta has lobbied for Chinese interests before. He registered as a lobbyist for the China-United States Exchange Foundation effective as of March 2015 with a focus on “China-U.S. relations” and targeting the House and Senate. He was paid $240,000 for it in 2015 and $320,000 in both 2016 and 2017.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in 2018 detailed “the extent of CUSEF’s ties to the Chinese government and its involvement in influence operations.”

Democrat ties to Huawei run deep. Biden picked attorney Christopher Fonzone to serve as the general counsel for Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. After his national security work in the Obama administration, Fonzone took a gig as a partner at the global Sidley Austin law firm, where he did what he called limited work in 2018 for Huawei and China’s Ministry of Commerce. Fonzone has declined to promise not to work for Chinese Communist Party-linked firms in the future.

James Cole, Obama’s deputy attorney general from 2011 to 2015, represented Huawei for Sidley beginning in 2017 until a judge barred him from continuing in December 2019, after prosecutors had argued that “there is a ‘substantial risk’ that Cole could use ‘confidential factual information’ obtained while serving as DAG to ‘materially advance’ Huawei’s current defense strategy.”

Samir Jain, Obama’s senior director for cybersecurity policy for the National Security Council, registered as a lobbyist for Huawei in March 2019 while working for Jones Day, with disclosure forms saying he received $60,000 from Huawei that year.

The Podesta Group, which was once one of the biggest lobbying firms in the country, fell apart amid the Mueller investigation. Podesta was granted roughly $43,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program aimed at helping small businesses harmed during the coronavirus pandemic.

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The head of the Justice Department’s FARA Unit, Heather Hunt, sent a letter to the Podesta Group’s lawyers in 2017 saying the firm had failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act for its representation of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, stating, “The ECFMU acted as an intermediary between Ukraine and the West to promote Ukraine’s political and economic interests.”

But Podesta was alerted in September 2019 that prosecutors in New York had closed the federal investigation into his organization’s work in Ukraine.

Podesta told the New York Times in July, “I don’t want to recreate what I had, but I sort of miss working, and art alone doesn’t sustain me, because I love politics.” His current business website touts his “unique mastery” of “how Washington works.”

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