Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

When it came to China, the implementation of FARA was just as seemingly random and inconsistent. Bannon claims Wynn was the subject of a Justice Department investigation for possible violations of FARA, for lobbying on behalf of the Chinese government regarding the Guo case. The FBI doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations. As of this writing, no charges were filed. But the Justice Department did indict another American who was working to extradite Guo, in August 2020. Nickie Lum Davis was charged with aiding and abetting the violation of FARA by working with Elliott Broidy, the former vice chairman of the Republican National Committee; rapper and member of the Fugees Pras Michel; and Jho Low, a Malaysian movie producer and financier who was indicted for his role in the pilfering of Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, by the prime minister at the time, Najib Razak.

According to the indictment, Davis, Broidy, and Low met with senior CCP officials in Shenzhen in 2017 to strategize about how to get Guo extradited to China. Broidy acknowledges receiving over $8 million from Low but for years denied breaking the law. After Davis pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate, the Justice Department raised the pressure on Broidy. In October 2020, the Justice Department released a thirty-one-page criminal information document tying Broidy to the lobbying scheme. As of this writing, he was expected to plead guilty. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in New York were investigating Guo’s finances related to GTV Media Group, the project Guo was working on with Bannon. New York federal prosecutors, in August 2020, indicted and arrested Bannon on accusations of fraud and embezzlement on an unrelated project to privately fund a sector of the border wall in Texas. There’s no firm evidence of a connection between the two investigations, but it is at the very least a strange coincidence.

Navarro believed that the shuttle diplomacy conducted by John Thornton, Schwarzman, Wynn, Henry Kissinger, and others violated the spirit, if not the letter, of FARA because it was meant to influence not only the policy process but the media environment as well. Navarro kept a file tracking the stories about the trade war in financial and business news outlets, especially the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. He was convinced he could demonstrate that these Americans came back from Beijing with specific messages and details from inside the trade negotiations that were leaked to trusted reporters. The goal was to shape the public discussion by leaking things that would benefit Beijing. Also, Mnuchin and others would show Trump these articles, which supported whatever advice they were offering at the time.

“As part of a Chinese government influence operation, these globalist billionaires are putting a full-court press on the White House in advance of the G-20 in Argentina,” Navarro said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies a year and a half after the Mar-a-Lago summit, right before Trump and Xi were set to meet in Buenos Aires. “The mission of these unregistered foreign agents—that’s what they are; they’re unregistered foreign agents—is to pressure this president into some kind of deal.”

The John Thornton Channel

While many of Trump’s billionaire friends played informal roles as message passers, one was more significant than the rest. Former Goldman Sachs copresident John Thornton became a behind-the-scenes player in the trade relationship, often shuttling back and forth between Beijing and Washington with delegations of other top US business leaders in tow.

Thornton had meticulously built one of the most reliable and high-level networks with the families that run the CCP, which operates more like a cartel with an aristocratic sheen than a socialist, much less communist, organtzation. His main claim to access and influence during the Trump years was due to his personal relationship with Chinese vice president Wang Qishan, whom Thornton had met in the 1990s when Wang was an official at the China Construction Bank and was Thornton’s Goldman Sachs client. Wang had been instrumental in building ties between Chinese government entities and US financial institutions. In 2012, he joined the Politburo Standing Committee. In 2018, he became Vice President of the People’s Republic of China.

Thornton was a proud proponent of smooth relations between Washington and Beijing based on economic integration and mutual investment. He was on the advisory board of China Investment Corporation, a sovereign wealth fund. He was chairman of the board of the Silk Road Financing Corporation, which is designed to fund the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative. The first Westerner to become a full professor at Tsinghua University (Xi Jinping’s alma mater) since the founding of the PRC, he also had operated at the top levels of US-China business and political relations for decades. He had endowed the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and was good friends with its director, Chinese American scholar Cheng Li; Xi Jinping’s nephew Xi Mingzheng had been an intern in that program while studying at Georgetown University. Thornton’s chairmanship of Barrick Gold Enterprises was just the latest iteration of a career spent ingratiating himself into the halls of power in New York, Washington, and Beijing.

In turn, Thornton has often presented a rosy picture about the CCP’s leaders and their intentions. In 2008, he wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs predicting (based on his conversations with senior Chinese leaders) that the CCP was moving toward democracy. In 2013 he predicted that party leadership would focus on strengthening the rule of law to respond to the grievances of regular citizens demanding more rights. If anything, the opposite has come to pass—but that doesn’t seem to have shaken Thornton’s faith in China’s leaders.

Ironically, Thornton’s entrée into the Trump administration was through Bannon, whose stated goal is to bring down the CCP. It would seem clear that Thornton represents everything Bannon is attacking: the co-opting of American elites by the CCP in exchange for corporate profits that leave American workers behind. But Bannon brought Thornton into Trump Tower and then the White House, where he ended up establishing an influential backchannel between Trump and the CCP’s very top ranks. Bannon was trying to enlist Thornton into his scheme, but Thornton ended up helping the pro-engagement crowd that Bannon was fighting.

Bannon had worked for Thornton at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s. They didn’t keep in close touch, but after Trump won, Bannon emailed Thornton and asked him to come to Trump Tower. “I need your help on China, because China is the whole thing,” Bannon told Thornton. He replied, “Steve, I’ve been waiting for 30 years to hear someone in that chair make that comment.” But when Bannon asked Thornton what role he might want in the administration, Thornton said he would be of greater value to Bannon—and Trump—if he stayed out and acted in private.

Thornton did, at least, meet with Bannon and Kushner several times before the inauguration. And in December, they brought him to meet with Trump in his Trump Tower office.

This late-2016 meeting arguably had real influence on how Trump approached Xi. “The president who recasts the US-China relationship, to the benefit of both countries and the world, that president is going to be seen to be great,” Thornton told the then president-elect. “And by the way, Mr. President, if you don’t do it, trust me, the next president is going to, because it’s going to become obvious.” Thornton told Trump that, over time, the United States and China should become “strategic partners.” He said that Trump needed to have a strong personal relationship of trust with Xi. He told Trump that Xi, whom Thornton had known for twenty-five years, was a good guy whom Trump would get along with.