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Georgia Senate Candidate Jon Ossoff Quietly Discloses Financial Ties to Pro-CCP Hong Kong Media Company

Georgia Democrat and Senate candidate Jon Ossoff has been compensated by a Hong Kong media conglomerate whose owner has spoken out against pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, according to his most recent financial disclosure.

Ossoff, whose role as CEO of a London-based producer of investigative documentaries has drawn scrutiny over the years, reported in an amended financial statement that he has received at least $5,000 from PCCW Media Limited over the last two years — a detail that has previously gone unreported. Ossoff did not disclose his ties to PCCW in his initial financial report, which he filed in May.

PCCW, the largest telecom agency in Hong Kong, is run by Chairman Richard Li, son of Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing. Li also serves as a councilor for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. But for years, Li has spoken out against Hong Kong independence and the pro-democracy protests that have rocked the island as the Chinese Communist Party has consolidated control.

An Ossoff campaign spokesperson told National Review that the payments stemmed from the airing of “two investigations produced by Jon’s company of ISIS war crimes against women and girls,” representing “one of dozens of TV stations and distributors in more than 30 countries that have aired Jon’s work.”

“Jon strongly supports Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and condemns the brutality and authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party,” the spokesperson added, after a National Review analysis of Ossoff’s public comments showed that the candidate has been silent on the situation in Hong Kong. Ossoff’s campaign declined to comment on whether he condemns Li’s opposition to the island’s pro-democracy movement.

In 2016, Li released a public statement asserting that he was “staunchly opposed to the independence of Hong Kong,” after a mainland Chinese media outlet reported that his company was backing pro-democracy singer Denise Ho Wan-see, prompting calls to boycott his companies from Chinese nationalists.

“Mr. Richard Li and MOOV would like to clearly state that the company and Mr. Li respect freedom of expression,” the statement read. “However, both Mr. Li and the Company are staunchly opposed to the independence of Hong Kong and it is their view that the independence of Hong Kong would not be feasible, and discussing Hong Kong’s independence is a waste of society’s resources.”

As protests reached a fever pitch in 2019, Li moved to take out full-page advertisements in seven newspapers to call for the restoration of “the social order with the rule of law,” backing the recommendations of Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council.

While Li reaffirmed the “One Country, Two Systems” principle that has governed Hong Kong since 1997, he has been silent since the Chinese Communist Party acted unilaterally to pass a sweeping new national security law in June, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said makes Hong Kong no longer an “autonomous” entity.

Li’s father Li Ka-shing has publicly backed the law, saying the Hong Kong people “need not over-hypothesise it,” even as Beijing has cracked down on its critics and dissenters. And when asked by Vulture what the law would mean for potential media censorship, a PCCW spokesperson said that “PCCW Media will operate its businesses in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.”

PCCW’s payments to Ossoff are not the only source of controversy in the amended report. In July, the Washington Free Beacon revealed that, based on the same disclosure, Ossoff has been compensated financially by the Qatari-backed news agency Al Jazeera over the past two years. Ossoff was heavily criticized for similar ties to Al Jazeera during his failed run for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District in 2017.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgia-senate-candidate-jon-ossoff-quietly-discloses-financial-ties-to-pro-ccp-hong-kong-media-company/

Outgoing Syria Envoy Admits Hiding US Troop Numbers; Praises Trump’s Mideast Record

Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.

Trump’s abruptly-announced withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria remains perhaps the single-most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office, and for Jeffrey, “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.” The order, first handed down in December 2018, led to the resignation of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump’s special envoy for Syria, into the role of special envoy in the counter-ISIS fight when it sparked the protest resignation of his predecessor, Brett McGurk.

For Jeffrey, the incident was far less cut-and-dry — but it is ultimately a success story that ended with U.S. troops still operating in Syria, denying Russian and Syrian territorial gains and preventing ISIS remnants from reconstituting.

In 2018 and again in October of 2019, when Trump repeated the withdrawal order, the president boasted that ISIS was “defeated.” But each time, the president was convinced to leave a residual force in Syria and the fight continued.

“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”

Officially, Trump last year agreed to keep several hundred U.S. troops — somewhere between 200 and 400, according to varying reports at the time — stationed in northeast Syria to “secure” oil fields held by the United States’ Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. It is generally accepted that the actual number is now higher than that — anonymous officials put the number at about 900 today — but the precise figure is classified and remains unknown even, it appears, to members of Trump’s administration keen to end the so-called “forever wars.”

As he exits public service again, Jeffrey is hardly derisive of the divisive president.

The career ambassador’s 2018 decision to serve in the Trump administration despite his political opposition to the president — and to champion his policies on the way out the door — is on-brand for an official described by colleagues as the consummate apolitical public servant. Jeffrey offers no polemics on the president’s character, even as he says he stands by his decision to sign the 2016 open letter that said Trump was “erratic” and “acts impetuously.”

“I know what I did in 2016, I do not disagree with that,” said Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. “I was following closely the situation with Iran, Iraq and Syria, and I was appalled that we didn’t have a more coherent policy. This wasn’t a political decision.”

Jeffrey now says that Trump’s “modest” and transactional approach to the Middle East has yielded a more stable region than either of his predecessors’ more transformational policies. President George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech heralding the seismic U.S. intervention into Iraq and President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo proclaiming a “new beginning” with the Muslim world represent an approach to the Middle East that “made things worse” and “weakened us,” Jeffrey said. Trump’s administration, he said, has looked at the Middle East through a geostrategic lens and kept its focus on Iran, Russia, and China, while keeping the metastatic “disease” of Islamist terror in check.

Jeffrey believes Trump has achieved a kind of political and military “stalemate” in a number of different cold and hot conflicts, producing a situation that is about the best any administration could hope for in such a messy, volatile region.

In Iraq, Jeffrey credits the Trump administration with maintaining relations with the central government and constraining Iranian influence in Baghdad.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/11/outgoing-syria-envoy-admits-hiding-us-troop-numbers-praises-trumps-mideast-record/170012/