White House, Pentagon Officials Traded Chinese Stocks While Mulling Blacklist: Report
High-ranking Pentagon and White House officials traded in Chinese stocks even as their offices were tasked with considering the companies for blacklisting.
More than 2,600 government employees owned or traded stocks whose prices would rise or fall depending on their actions, according to a new investigative report by The Wall Street Journal, which analyzed 31,000 financial disclosure forms from 12,000 senior government employees and political staffers.
Of those 2,600 federal officials, more than 400 owned or traded in Chinese stocks, including in the Department of Defense, Department of State, and White House, the Oct. 11 report said.
“The Defense Department was among the federal agencies with the most officials who invested in Chinese stocks, even as the Pentagon in recent years has shifted its focus to countering China,” the report said.
The report also found that, from 2016 through 2021, more than 25 percent of government employees at the Department of the Treasury, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense, Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Federal Reserve traded in stocks of firms that were actively lobbying their agency.
Notably, officials in the Pentagon, State Department, and White House were found to have traded in numerous Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Baidu, and the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, also known as Sinopec.
Sinopec is owned by the China Petrochemical Corporation, which is overseen by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, a special commission of the Chinese Communist Party.
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