Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

Ma was the single best Chinese businessman at getting access to the top levels of the Trump administration. He was involved in setting up meetings between US and Chinese businesspeople in partnership with Ross and Stephen Schwarzman, who would hold informal salons with top-tier Chinese businesspeople in a way that blurred the line between official and unofficial interactions. At the time of his dinner with Ivanka, Ma also was lobbying the administration to allow his investment company, Ant Financial, to acquire MoneyGram, the second-largest cash transfer outlet chain in the United States. The deal was later blocked by the board of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which consisted of nine national security agencies that vetted foreign acquisitions, due to concerns about a Chinese company having the data of millions of Americans and their spending habits.

But Ma wasn’t the only well-connected figure who was helping Beijing’s elite cozy up to the American president’s family—or even necessarily the most successful. The guest list for Jared and Ivanka’s secret meeting with Chinese investors in Beijing, for instance, had reportedly been arranged by none other than Wendi Deng Murdoch—the former wife of Rupert Murdoch, and a close friend of Jared and Ivanka’s for many years. She was also a person of interest to the FBI—and had been for many years.

The Wendi Deng Murdoch Connection

Deng Murdoch was one of the most mysterious figures in the US-China relationship. Superhawks such as Steve Bannon believed she was an agent for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Her defenders said she was simply an amazingly successful immigrant whose relationships and influence were unmatched. One way or another, her connections to the Trump family were nearly unparalleled—and were cause, to some, for serious concern.

Deng Murdoch was born in Jinan, the capital city of the eastern province of Shandong, south of Beijing, in 1968. Her birth name, Deng Wenge, means “Cultural Revolution Deng,” reflecting the fact that she was born at the movement’s height. She was raised in the city of Xuzhou, in Jiangsu Province, which is just south of Shandong. She has said that her family was poor, but in fact her parents were engineers. In her youth, she moved to Guangdong to run a factory with the rest of the family.

In 1987, Deng Murdoch met a Los Angeles couple named Jake and Joyce Cherry. Jake was working in Guangzhou and Joyce became her English tutor. The following year, they returned to LA and sponsored her student visa so she could join them and live in their house while completing her degree. It soon emerged that she was having an affair with Jake Cherry. They later married after his relationship with Joyce ended, but then quickly divorced after she began studying at California State University—and began dating businessman David Wolf.

Her CSU economics professor Ken Chapman would later reflect that Deng Murdoch had lived a lavish lifestyle in California, with “more state-of-the-art computer equipment than anyone had ever seen before.” He also said that she often served as an interpreter for visiting Chinese official trade delegations and bragged about contacts with top CCP officials. But even bigger things were in store for the young student.

After completing her undergraduate degree at CSU, she moved to Yale, earned an MBA in 1996, and got a job in Hong Kong working for Murdoch’s Star TV, reportedly helping build the company’s partnerships in China. She had responsibility over Phoenix, a Chinese-language channel owned by Star that is based in Hong Kong but well understood there to be friendly to Beijing and its propaganda goals.

She met Rupert Murdoch during a trip to Hong Kong to visit Star TV. They were soon married, but divorced in 2013 after fourteen years. She had reportedly been having affairs with multiple men, including Tony Blair and Google’s Eric Schmidt. Murdoch has implied that the rumors Deng had an affair with Blair, at least, are true, and in 2014, Vanity Fair published the text of a diary entry allegedly written by Deng in which she confessed her love for Blair. It read, “Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt . . . And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes.” Blair has denied the claims.

Deng Murdoch met Jared and Ivanka because they lived in the same building in New York City, and the two couples became fast friends.

In March 2013, a Chinese blog claimed that she had worked for the Propaganda Division of the People’s Liberation Army General Political Department’s Liaison Department (reformed as the People’s Liberation Army Political Work Department’s Liaison Bureau in 2016). The article claimed that she had been recruited by the agency in 1986, and that the following year, she had met an American couple and begun an affair with the husband, migrating to America with their support. She “formally became a General Political Department spy” in 1996, the blog post claims, the year she returned to China—and the year before she met Rupert Murdoch.

The post was republished on dissident media sites, but its reliability is unclear; the author attributed their information on Deng simply to “an insider in Beijing.” Still, this was one more brick in the wall of evidence against the Kushners’ friend—and there would soon be others.

The Nanny

The mystery surrounding Deng Murdoch was enough for the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division to brief Jared in early 2017 that she might be using her relationship with them to “further the interests of the Chinese government.” The specific concern reported was a counterintelligence assessment that Deng had been lobbying for a high-profile project to build a $100 million Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington. The project set off FBI alarms because it was set to be funded by the Chinese government and included a seventy-foot white tower that officials feared could be used for spying. The plans were shelved after the FBI’s concerns were made public. Through a spokesperson, Deng denied to the Wall Street Journal that she knew anything about the concerns surrounding her relationships in China or about the garden project.

Jared and Ivanka issued a statement at the time saying they “have been friends with Rupert and Wendi Murdoch for a decade before coming to Washington and their relationship is neither political nor about China.” There’s no doubt they were close friends. Michael Wolff’s book Siege: Trump Under Fire claims that Deng helped introduce Jared to Wu Xiaohui, the Anbang chairman who met him in New York during the transition before later getting purged. Deng and the Kushners vacationed together in Croatia in 2016. Ivanka was even a trustee for a time for a trust fund set aside for Rupert and Wendi’s children.

When the Kushners started to have children, they hired Deng Murdoch’s longtime nanny, a Chinese national who has only been referred to publicly as “Xixi.” This nanny, in fact, was another cause of concern for counterintelligence officials looking at the relationship between Deng Murdoch and the Kushners.

The Kushner family rarely even acknowledges their Chinese nanny Xixi. Ivanka first revealed her existence in a 2012 interview with the South China Morning Post, where she said that her family had a nanny who was teaching Mandarin to her daughter, Arabella. Ivanka’s 2017 book, Women Who Work, never mentioned Xixi or the family’s other nanny, Lisa, until the acknowledgments section.

But Xixi’s presence would make itself felt in other ways. During the Mar-a-Lago summit, Arabella and her brother, Joseph, had performed in Mandarin for Xi and his wife; later that year, when he had met with Xi in Beijing, Donald Trump had played a video of Arabella singing in Mandarin and dedicating her performance to “Grandpa Xi” and “Grandma Peng.” But he made no mention of his granddaughter’s teacher—her Chinese nanny. Ivanka also brought Arabella to the Chinese embassy in Washington to sing in Mandarin, videos of which went viral in China.