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Rubio asks CIA director nominee Burns about think tank's ties to China

During a Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing on Wednesday, nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency William Burns responded to Sen. Marco Rubio’s question about Burns’s tenure as head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the organization's relationship with China.

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MARCO RUBIO: Ambassador let me-- you know, in your written questions, you acknowledged that China uses cultural and educational programs, things like the Confucius Institutes and others, to try to influence US policy debates to spread pro-China propaganda. So given this acknowledgment, I wanted to focus a little bit on your time as the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Now, Carnegie is involved with the China United States Exchange Foundation, an organization that you acknowledged in your written questions or answers that's part of China's United Front System, which is an effort to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition and part of their efforts to encourage foreign countries to adopt positions and narrative supportive of Beijing's preferred policies.

And in this work at the endowment, it's reported that in 2019, you invited 11 congressional staffers on a trip to China. They met with a professor who worked for the Communist Party Central Committee.

They met with the president of another front group for the Chinese Communist Party, a group that was designated last October by the State Department as a group that seeks to directly influence-- and actually, the quote is sought to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders in the United States.

And this group that you partnered with, the China United States Exchange Foundation, a congressionally appointed commission in August of 2018 said that they showed a clear intent to influence policy towards China in the United States.

So given your stated concerns about Chinese soft power influence efforts, why, while you were at the helm, did Carnegie Endowment for International Peace establish a relationship with and accept funding from from this group, this China United States Exchange Foundation?

WILLIAM BURNS: Well, thanks, Senator Rubio for the question. I mean, the first thing I'd emphasize is the Carnegie Endowment is a proudly independent and transparent organization and scrupulous about ensuring that whatever financial support it receives, whether it's from trustees or foundations, doesn't in any way, shape the content or the conclusions of scholarly work at Carnegie. That's first.

Second, on the China US Exchange Foundation, this is a relationship that I inherited when I became president of Carnegie and that I ended not long after I became president, precisely for the concerns that you just described, because we were increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations.

Shortly after I ended that relationship, we began a program at the Carnegie Endowment on countering foreign influence operations, which was aimed mostly at China and Russia and was supported in part from a grant from the Global Engagement Center at the State Department in the last administration.

On the second issue, Senator Rubio, that you raised on the congressional staff delegation, in 2019, we did partner with the Aspen Institute, which, as you know, for decades under the leadership of Dan Glickman, former Congressman Dan Glickman, has managed both member and staff delegations to many different parts of the world. This was a trip that included senior staff members, both Republicans and Democrats, both from the House and the Senate.

It was fully approved in advance by the House Ethics Committee, and in my view, was an illustration of what an institution like Carnegie should do, which is to provide congressional staff members with an opportunity to engage directly with Chinese counterparts and to express their concerns about Chinese actions and maligned behavior quite directly.

So in that sense, I think it was a good illustration of what a non-governmental institution, like Carnegie working with the Aspen Institute, can do. But I share your concerns about foreign influence operations. And as I said, we've tried to demonstrate in our work at Carnegie over the time that I was president our appreciation of that threat.