House Committee Presses Harvard’s Garber on Communist China Influence
Plus, Biden shuffles out to call for a less bold presidency
The chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, John Moolenaar, is pressing Harvard for answers about an April 2024 event at which a Harvard student, Cosette Wu, protesting an appearance by Communist China’s ambassador, Xie Feng, was “dragged” out of the event by “a Harvard student from China.”
A July 1 letter from Moolenaar to Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, said that “Tsering Yangchen, another Harvard student protester removed from the event after Wu, later told Voice of America that a student from China, who appeared to be one of the event organizers, approached her and asked for the names of protestors. That individual then followed her, causing her to feel scared.”
“This incident raises serious questions regarding possible transnational repression by the Chinese government and the involvement of international students from China at Harvard in acts of harassment and intimidation condoned by the Chinese government against its critics,” Moolenaar says in the letter. “Universities should be bastions of freedom, and prestigious institutions like Harvard should hold themselves to an even higher standard to ensure a safe environment for students’ freedom of expression and push back against any foreign government effort to silence their critics on campus.”
The letter includes 13 questions that it’s asking Harvard to answer by July 26. It also asks Garber to organize a briefing for the committee about the incident.
The chairman of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department, Charles Lieber, was convicted in 2021 for six criminal counts in connection with lying to the government about getting paid by China. He was sentenced last year to time served (two days) in prison; two years of supervised release with six months of home confinement; a fine of $50,000; and $33,600 in restitution to the IRS.
At a Brookings Institution event today, Secretary of State Blinken accused China of seeking global dominance. Asked, “Are the Chinese looking to compete or are they looking to dominate?” Blinken replied, “I think China’s objectives are clear. Over time, over the coming decades, they would like to be the leading country, the dominant country, in the international system militarily, economically, diplomatically. That’s clear. And if their vision for the world actually matched ours or matched many other countries, that would be one thing. But they have a different vision, a different vision of what that future looks like.” Blinken didn’t spell out the differences, but the obvious one is that the American vision involves more political and economic and religious freedom than the Chines Communist one does.
Harvard’s mishandling of anti-Israel protests was the subject of a congressional investigation that helped to topple Garber’s predecessor, President Claudine Gay. The protest against the Chinese government official has attracted much less mainstream press attention, at least so far.
Boldness of the president: At Seth Lipsky’s birthday party a few years ago I read, aloud, excerpts from an editorial headlined “Boldness of the President” that had appeared in the February 13, 1998 issue of the Forward, a Jewish weekly. It quoted from Justice Scalia’s dissent in the case of Morrison v. Olson, a 1988 case in which the Supreme Court, with Scalia the lone dissenter, ruled the Independent Counsel Act constitutional. “Perhaps the boldness of the President himself will not be affected—though I am not so sure,” The Great Scalia warned.
Back in 1998 the president was Bill Clinton and the prosecutor was Kenneth Starr. The Forward’s concern about sapping boldness in the fight against terrorism proved no abstraction, but sadly well founded, as the New York Sun noted in a May 2008 editorial, “The Boldness of the President.” It was published after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported that Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, had four separate times thrown up objections to plans to take action against Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden.
Now here we are in 2024—26 years after the Forward’s “Boldness of the President” editorial—and boldness of the president is again before the justices. In Trump v. United States the word “bold” or a variation of it appears 11 times. The majority opinion endorsing broad immunity for official actions by the president avers that the “danger” of criminal prosecution “is akin to, indeed greater than, what led us to recognize absolute Presidential immunity from civil damages liability—that the President would be chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive.” The case cited is a 1982 opinion, Nixon v. Fitzgerald, in which Justice Powell, in a 5-4 decision, granted broad civil immunity to presidents because in the absence of immunity executive branch officials “would hesitate to exercise their discretion…even when the public interest required bold and unhesitating action.”
Justice Thomas’s concurrence, in a brilliant echo of Scalia, doubts the constitutionality of the special counsel prosecuting Trump.
President Biden shuffled out at the White House tonight to denounce the Supreme Court as a whole and its ruling in this case, a departure from longstanding custom that a president expresses respect for the rule of law even if he disagrees with an outcome. (Obama violated this taboo with his reaction to Citizens United.) It was a stunning display—a president advocating for an outcome that would sap his own boldness. Perhaps Biden himself is so lacking in boldness that he can’t see the concern, though for a president who has visited both Kyiv and Tel Aviv in wartime, you’d think he’d want to at least leave himself some room to maneuver. Or perhaps the reason Biden is so cavalier about diminishing the boldness of the office of the presidency is that he himself doesn’t intend to occupy it for much longer—and he has an extremely low opinion of all of his potential successors. That’s just about the only situation imaginable in which constraining the boldness of a president with threats of endless prosecution and litigation makes any sense at all.
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