Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/12/22 Ben Freeman on how Taiwan and Other Foreign Governments Control American Foreign Policy

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Ben Freeman is back to talk about who’s really influencing United States foreign policy. Freeman recently wrote a paper about the Taiwan lobby. He talks to Scott about how this Taiwan lobby was involved in making the recent Pelosi trip happen. Scott and Freeman talk about how we find ourselves in a situation where foreign governments have more influence on America’s policies than the American people and American business too.  Discussed on the show: “The Taiwan Lobby” (Center for International Policy) “How the Taiwan lobby helped pave the way for Pelosi’s trip” (Responsible Statecraft) “Bipartisan ‘Fighting Foreign Influence Act’ targets think tank funding” (Responsible Statecraft) “The well-traveled road from member of Congress to foreign agent” (Responsible Statecraft) “Feds accuse Brookings president Gen. Allen of illegally lobbying for Qatar” (Responsible Statecraft) Ben Freeman is a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute. He previously served as Director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative with the Center for International Policy. Read his work at Antiwar.com and Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @BenFreemanDC. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right to guys introducing ben freeman research fellow at the quincy institute for responsible state craft he wrote the book the foreign policy auction and um he previously was director of the foreign

Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy and that's a mouthful, but check this out. They've got this brand new, giant thing. Holly Zhang and Ben Freeman Foreign Influenced Transparency Initiative, the Taiwan

lobby. So I guess you're still moonlighting back with the year old crew there. And this is all about the Taiwan lobby and incidentally and coincidentally coming out right around the time that Nancy Pelosi's making her controversial trip over there and everything.

So can't wait to dig into this. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Ben? I'm doing great, Scott. Always a pleasure to be here with you. Hell yeah. Happy to have you. And, well, it's just bottom line. First, the foreign governments around the world, China and Taiwan, both probably, have more influence over the American government's policies towards them and towards whatever other countries they're interested in than the American people.

And that would even include, to a great degree, American business. It's, yeah, I think that's really true in a lot of cases, Scott. And I think when people see these things in the news, like Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, things going on in the Middle East right now, they read the headlines, but they don't know that beneath those headlines. There's these massive multi-million dollar lobbying and influence operations that are helping to make a lot of this happen. And Pelosi's trip is the perfect example. You know, everybody, acted like they were blindsided by it, but as you mentioned, I wrote a report on the Taiwan lobby two years ago, and we saw all this coming. Taiwan's just been paved in the way for this for years. This was just sort of the exclamation point on work they've been doing for a while. Yeah. Well, it's just an amazing phenomenon. It's part of being an empire or having an empire is it's in the interest of every state in the world to have as much influence with the United States as they can

as we make it that way. But it's just funny because I think I'm being redundant from another interview with somebody last week or something, sorry audience, but it's still, I think, a good point. Like, if you were just some guy from here, you might think that foreign governments just interact with our state department.

They send their ambassadors to deal with our ambassador and they do the thing and they argue about what to do and they have their idea and they debated at the White House and that has almost nothing to do with it, in fact. It's all this money, all this stuff going on on K Street down there, just the same as if they're lobbying for tobacco or for trucks or for tube socks, for soldiers, or whatever it was.

Any other racket in D.C. Yeah, I think the American, I think you're dead right, Scott. Most of the American public, I think, has this image of this diplomatic process. working, like it's an English sitcom, like it's Downton Abbey, you know, where they're just sitting there having a nice tea with your ambassador and our ambassador, and, you know, they figure it all out there. But it really couldn't be further from the truth. What's really going on is the swamp of D.C. It's lobbyists meeting with members of Congress. It's lobbying firms hiring former members of Congress themselves to do the lobbying of their current colleagues. You know,

know, it's the ultimate conflicts of interest in the whole system is fueled by multi-million dollar contracts from these foreign governments, which in many cases, you know, as we mentioned, you know, we talk about China, we talk about Russia a lot, we talk about Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and a lot of cases, these are not our, you know, our friends out there in the world. These are authoritarian regimes who are our adversaries, or maybe in the case of Saudi Arabia are our frenemies, these are not the regimes that I think a lot of Americans would be happy that our politicians are in bed with. Yeah. And you know what? Even if people really love the Israelis, you got to admit, I mean, there are times where they sell our secrets to China

and stuff like that. But even if you love them, they get us into trouble. They create enemies for us, and it's just undeniable. And it's not for being a nice little Jewish boy, minding their own business either. It's for their brutal occupation and mistreatment of the Palestinians and the Lebanese as well, you know, especially in the past. But yeah, and I think another big issue with the Israelis is all the surveillance equipment. And, you know, we've heard about all this with the Pegasus spyware. And, you know, this is an Israeli company whose software is being used to spy on American citizens. So if you're at all concerned about your privacy, your digital privacy especially, you've got to be concerned about this Israeli influence. Regardless of

whatever you think about Israel or not, the fact that we have somebody who is supposed to be, you know, this vaunted U.S. ally that's using this sophisticated technology to spy on American citizens, I think that should trouble anyone here in the U.S. Yeah. Well, and I'm sorry, I've got to bring it up. Though just the entire schism in the Middle East. East. They got us fighting on bin Laden's side against the Shiites, even though it wasn't Hezbollah what knocked our towers down. It was the radical Sunni, Solofi, you know, right-wing edge of the Sunni side that attacked us, our own former, you know, mercenaries blowing back and all of that. And yet, even just after six, five, six years, not even, five years, Bush launched

his redirection. Everything's forgiven, Osama bin Laden. We're back on. your side and been fighting for them ever since. And nine-tenths of the reason for that is Israel and the other tenth is Saudi. Yeah. Maybe it's more 70-30. But they got us, we're fighting again, we're preferring the bin Ladenites to the Shiites because of what these foreign governments want, regardless of what happened in New York City. Yeah. There was a famous comedian back in the day who said 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. We attacked Iraq. Did we miss? Yeah. Pretty deliberate accidentally on purpose. One of those mistakes, I think, they call it, you know? Yeah, Scott, I mean, it's funny you bring this up because I was recently going back and doing some more

historical research tracing back. One of the big firms for the Saudi lobby is a group called Corvus Communications. And they signed a contract with the Saudis right after 9-11. In just a four-year period after 9-11, they got more than $50 million from the Saudi government to just basically do this giant spin operation for the Saudis. And it worked. I think they were a big part of it. And you mentioned the Israel lobby. They were a big part of it too.

But putting the money into these influence campaigns, I think it really does. does work. And the Iraq war is the perfect example of just how damaging and disastrous that can be for U.S. foreign policy. Yeah. All right. So let's get into what used to be called the China lobby, but now China means Beijing and not Taipei. So now it's the Taiwan lobby. But this has always been a very influential right-wing lobby, especially inside the Republican Party. But they've got a lot of money, and they've been going to work. And you wrote a gigantic PDF all about it with your co-author here. So please take us through it, sir. Yeah, sure. So we took a hard look at the Taiwan lobby because we, you know, much like we're talking about with the Israel

lobby, sometimes our friends out there in the world, they can get us into trouble too. And nobody had really taken a hard look at what Taiwan was doing here in the U.S. in terms of its influence. There's all this talk about, you know, China's influence and everything. And I think, I think it's justified. China does have a ton of influence here, but I think we also need to take a hard look at our allies, too, and see what they're doing to get us into trouble. So what we found was Taiwan was doing quite a bit. And we found, for example, that since 2016, they've spent more than $20 million on lobbying and influence operations here. And a lot of this is congressionally focused. And in fact, we found that they've had meetings or telephone calls or emails. with more than 90% of all members of Congress. So the vast, vast majority of members of Congress,

they or their staff have been touched in some way by Taiwan's lobbyists. And we found that in many cases, their work was successful. For example, a couple of years ago, they were really reaching out to Pelosi's office, trying to secure a meeting with the president of Taiwan and the speaker. And they were successful. They ultimately got the meeting when Pelosi met with the president. And so now when you fast forward from that to this recent trip, you see how this lobbying and this influence really helps to pave the way for some of the most pivotal moments in this U.S. foreign policy process.

And another facet that we delved into a little bit, my wonderful colleague Eli Clifton at the Quincy Institute, he's done a lot of great work on this too. Oh, yeah. Is Taiwan's influence at think tanks? Eli has a great piece up on responsible state crap about exactly this. And man, they throw money at the lobbying firms, but boy, howdy, do they throw some money at think tanks, too? And, you know, it's some of the biggest players in the think tank space, too. It's, you know, places like Brookings, Center for American Progress, Hudson Institute.

They've all received hundreds of thousands, in some cases, millions of dollars, from the Taiwanese government. And what we found recently, particularly, you know, following Pelosi's trip, is that these same think tanks that are getting big bucks from Taiwan, they're also the same think tanks that are making light of Pelosi's trip and they're providing her some cover fire for this very risky trip, you know, saying things like, oh, it's no big deal that China's running these military operations. You know, oh, everybody just needs to calm down about Pelosi's trip.

when I think most Americans, and frankly, most foreign policy folks in D.C. were looking at this trip and going, why? What did the U.S. get out of this? And why would we do something so provocative? I think the answer for Pelosi and what we know from our research is that what she got and what paved the way for this trip was the Taiwan lobby. Were these lobbyists and were these think tanks that are in part funded by the government of Taiwan. All right. So her previous scandal from just a couple of weeks ago was her husband

investing in, uh, in Vidia, I believe it was, one of these powerful chip firms right before the Congress announced this bill for massive new subsidies in the name, I think, of bringing them home from Taiwan, uh, so that we're not so dependent on Taiwan in case China invades them. But anyway, then they got a big stock bump and everyone could tell the obvious conflict of interest and insider trading, which is illegal for America. unless you're a congressperson, and so Pelosi got away with it. But then, so she goes straight to Taiwan, where they make the chips. And in fact, then the New York Post has a thing about how she had her son with her,

and he's a big investor in a Chinese company, which they didn't, I don't believe, explicate a direct conflict of interest there. If anything, it seemed like the conflict would go the other way, unless he knows something we don't about an upcoming merger between companies or some kind of thing. I don't know, but they didn't seem to detail anything in the post there. So, but can you just talk a little bit about that, about is there any indication from your point of view that just, you know, pumping and dumping and these kinds of things with these chip companies has anything to do with her activity, her own personal corruption, and or can you identify for us any particular conflict of interest that her son might have there, Ben? Yeah, yeah, yeah, all good questions. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the stock market is very limited.

And I did dive into this a little bit in the Farah filings. And, you know, I didn't find any smoking guns there or anything that would shine any more light on this. But I will say that, you know, having kept an eye on Pelosi's exquisite stock trading skills, I would say, If any of us, you know, wants to get rich, just follow her moves. You know, follow those portfolios because I think it's, you know, clear she either has a crystal ball going or are there's something else going on that has made her stock portfolio very, very lucrative. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm going to have to say it's the corruption there. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones.

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And I thought I saw Tom Dashel in there somewhere, but then I didn't see his name come back up when I was looking for it. But these are some powerful lobbies directly influencing Pelosi, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or I guess Dole was focusing on the role. Republicans, obviously, right? Yeah, yeah, he was. But I mean, that's the interesting thing when these folks turn foreign agent. They do, they do tend to focus on folks within their own party, but they still have sway because of name recognition with folks from the other party, too.

And so, you know, you see this with Taiwan, hiring some of these former members of Congress in other countries, too. In fact, my colleague, Nick Cleveland Stout and I, we have a piece up on responsible statecraft, too, where we wanted to get a hand on just how much. this, we call it the revolving door, revolving door to foreign agents, how common this was. And we found almost 100 members of Congress have done this in the past 20 years. They've left Congress and gone on to work for foreign powers. And in a majority of cases, they go on to work for authoritarian regimes. They go on to work with some of the worst dictatorships in the world.

You know, every year from, you know, the Saudis, Muammar Gaddafi, you name it. there's a dictator out there in the world, chances are, a former member of Congress has worked for them. And now, but what about senators? I mean, Dashel was in the leadership, right? He and Geppart, that was like the majority leader in the whip, right, or something like that? That's right. That's right. And that's not uncommon either. And going back forever or going back just the last 20 years or going back to win?

Just the last 20 years. Yeah, yeah, we only looked at, I believe it was to either 2002 or 2003. I mean, but do you have any indication of whether this is how it's always been in the 90s and 80s and 70s before that, that U.S. senators would just go sign up to represent foreign governments lobbying in America? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's happened before, too. We didn't do our quantitative analysis, didn't go back that far. Right. But, yeah, we have anecdotal examples.

Going back to World War II, even, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is my friend of butter, goes back to 1938. And we've got examples even during World War II of folks. that were, you know, former members of Congress and who went on to become lobbyist and propagandists registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, even that long ago. So, you know, this is a decades-old thing that just keeps coming to prominence more and more. Yeah. It's funny. I mean, I guess the only thing that would stop that would be a law that these people would

have to pass against themselves, which they're not going to do. Right. Or some kind of cultural moray against this sort of corruption and conflict of interest and, you know, like a feeling of a consensus of dishonor about someone who would do such a thing. How could you be Tom Daschle, the majority leader of the Senate, and then turn around and sell your influence to foreign states? Yeah. It's insane. It sounds, in what world is this perfectly normalized, I guess this one, but it sounds. to me, just on the face of it, like the most blatantly corrupt and dishonorable and shameful

and unpatriotic thing for somebody like that to do. I don't know, some schmuck congressman I've never heard of, I don't know, but a U.S. Center, the majority leader, the U.S. Senate? Right. You know? It's not uncommon either. You know, we have all these examples of former heads of the foreign affairs committees, too. Ed Royce, for example, Ileana Ross Layton. You know, that they're all working as foreign agents for dictatorships now. Pelosi, speaking of Pelosi, her former chief of staff, Nadia M. El Shami, he's now a lobbyist for the dictatorial government in Egypt. So you go across the board. It's the most high-profile members of Congress and their staff that are becoming these foreign agents, cashing out

in making millions of dollars to, and in fact, literally work for dictators. all right now i'm not making fun because all my hair's falling out too but i'm just saying that if you say think tank to me i picture a big fat guy with a bald head sitting there working on papers thinking very hard about what america's national security policy should be and having very detailed in depth and nuanced arguments with other people like that too until they come up with the smartest answer to protect america's national interest but you're telling me that when it comes to weapons sales, and by weapons, we mean F-16s and sea missiles, you know, sea-skimming missiles or this kind of thing, that these policies are decided essentially by the salesman first and the foreign government first, and then they only essentially launder their motive through said eggheads and make it seem like this was somebody's smart idea rather than someone's just, project for either their foreign national interest or their domestic financial one.

Right, right. Yeah, I think when you were first talking about think tanks, you know, with the, you know, the fuzzy-headed guy just, you know, reading his book. I think that's what I like to call think tanks in theory. That's what we would like to believe think tanks to. And I think a lot of these, you know, more, you know, on the take think tanks would like you to think that they do. In reality, it's what you described there, Scott.

It's the think tanks in many cases, they're doing a lot of activities and work that looks a lot like what these foreign governments, lobbyists, and PR pros are doing. In many cases, they're just regurgitating these lobbyist talking points, but they're putting them into op-eds and reports. In some cases, we know that foreign governments are directly paying them to produce. certain reports that are favorable to those foreign governments. For example, the United Arab Emirates paid the Center for New American Security for a study on the U.S. exporting armed drones. And surprise, surprised, a few months later, CNAS comes out with a study that says we should, in fact,

export armed drones to wait for it, the UAE, the very country that funded them to do the report. So we see these examples just left and right now. And I think the unfortunate, thing is for the average member of the American public who sees one of these experts on on TV or are on the radio. You know, they hear them as if, you know, they're announced as they're some expert from this place, this fancy think tank. But very, very rarely in those interviews, is it ever mentioned that those think tanks take hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from the exact same foreign governments that these experts are talking about? Yeah. I mean, and here you guys have this thing, you and Eli together at Responsible Statecraft.

Fed's accused Brookings President, General Allen, of illegally lobbying for Qatar, retired four-star general. That's right. And the president of arguably the most prestigious think tank in America or in the world. And he is now allegedly being accused of illegal lobbying for Qatar. The president of the Brookings Institute. Now, does that just mean he didn't register for FARA or he did something worse than that? Yeah, he, according to this warrant application, he hasn't been indicted.

All of this information was revealed in a leaked document from the Department of Justice. And what that alleges is that he was effectively working as a registered for an agent for the Katari government for a very brief period of time. and that, you know, he wanted to get some compensation for what he was doing, and then allegedly, you know, he was the FBI talked to him about this, and they allege that he destroyed some documents, he deleted some emails that they were later able to obtain. So it's a pretty significant accusation against him that not only was he operating as an unregistered for an agent that he was actively trying to undermine the FBI's investigation on top of that, too. So it's a very serious allegation. It's yet to be seen if he gets indicted, let alone convicted for all of this. Yeah, well, I ain't going to hold my breath for that, but still it's important to note. These are the people who lured their supposed honor and specialities and every kind of thing over the heads of the rest of us.

We're supposed to defer to them, but apparently John Allen's nothing but a crook. So glad we got that straight. Yeah, and I think that, like, that's the end. He also lost a bunch of wars, but never mind. that no harm no foul there right yeah yeah that's a that's a credential these days seriously that's how you know you're in with the right crowd because they all lost these wars together so yeah there you know so so to be specific on the Taiwan thing you really do have uh as you document in the piece here this major effort to get Congress to decide I mean through the think tanks

whatever, to get Congress to appropriate all this money to pass legislation mandating that America transfer all these weapons to Taiwan. The policy's really made in Taiwan first, not by the United States, not by any egghead or any general or anyone taking the American national interests into account at all. It's just the foreign government and the armed salesmen and their servants, including our congressmen and senators, the president. I mean, Scott, with something like this, I think it combines a lot of the complexes that are out there. First, it combines the military industrial complex because if you're an arms maker, you want to sell arms. And they don't appear to have too many qualms about who they're selling those arms to. And so if Taiwan's a candidate to sell arms to, they could sell billions of dollars to them, they're those military industrial complex lobbyists are then activated to try and get that sale to go through. But it also activates what I focus on, which is the foreign. influence industrial complex where you get these foreign government lobbyists on board too who can then they're pushing the same agenda as these weapons makers are and so you have these two

multi-million dollar lobbying and influence campaigns all pushing in the same direction getting everybody in on the take because they're of course making a lot of campaign contributions to members of Congress too and then as we discussed before they're hiring them after they leave office as well So everybody in the little D.C. bubble is in on the take. And at the end of the day, the American people have to pay the price for this in a much more aggressive and unrestrained U.S. foreign policy. Yeah. Man, oh, man. Well, thank goodness we've got you guys keeping watch on them and like a hawk, too, but the good kind of hawk. So we really appreciate it, Ben. Yeah. Thanks, Scott, as always. Pleasure. Absolutely. All right, you guys. That is Ben. Freeman, he's over there with the great Kelly Vlahos and Andrew Basevich and Trita Parsi and Eli Clifton and William Hartung and the great crew at the Quincy Institute for Responsible

Statecraft. Here he co-authored this new study with Holly Zhang. It's called the Taiwan Lobby. It's for the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7. FM in LA. APSRadio.com.

Antiwar.com Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org.