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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and at least three other House Democrats‘ campaigns paid thousands in advertising costs to a Chinese newspaper classified by the Justice Department as a foreign agent.
It comes as tensions are reaching all-time-highs between Washington and Beijing as the new GOP-controlled House zeros-in on addressing competition and the rising threat from China.
Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for reelection in her New York district spent nearly $1,500 on advertising with Sing Tao Newspapers during the 2022 midterms, a Fox News Digital review of campaign finance records reveals.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show that Representatives Grace Meng and Nicole Malliotakis of New York and Kevin Mullin of California also dropped between $1,000 and $7,000 to various Sing Tao entities in reelection campaign advertising expenses.
Sing Tao U.S. is a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao News Corporation Ltd.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and three other Democrat lawmakers paid thousands in advertising for their 2022 midterm campaigns to a newspaper forced by the DOJ to register as a Chinese foreign agent
The building for the Sing Tao U.S. subsidiary where the New York offices are located
The newspaper is considered pro-Beijing.
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The four U.S. campaigns spent advertising expenses at this Chinese-owned entity after the Department of Justice (DOJ) forced it to register as a Chinese foreign agent in August 2021.
China has increasingly come onto the U.S. radar as a main adversary, specifically in terms of competition and global defenses.
Beijing is growing more ire toward Washington with politicians’ acknowledging the autonomy of the island nation of Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long claimed as their territory.
To counter these U.S. claims, China has ramped up its military drills and operations in the South China Sea near the island.
More than half of the content of Sing Tao’s U.S. operation is purchased from another Chinese company, Star Production (Shenzhen) Limited, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings.
Sing Tao’s parent company operates the oldest Chinese-language newspaper in Hong Kong and in June 2021 a majority stake was purchased by the daughter of a wealthy mainland China property developer, Axios previously reported.
Two months after the purchase, the DOJ classified the company as a Chinese foreign agent.
U.S. operations for Sing Tao include newspapers in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as a radio station in Burlingame, California.
Sing Tao U.S. has maintained that it is free from CCP influence.
But the Council on Foreign Relations suggested this doesn’t matter because China has one of the ‘world’s most restrictive media environments, relying on censorship to control information in the news, online, and on social media.’
