Gallagher: China Exploits Biden’s Desire to Meet with Them and We’ve Avoided Tough Actions to Get a Meeting

During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street,” Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) said that the Biden administration has delayed needed and past due sanctions on Chinese officials and avoided transparency on the Chinese spy balloon in pursuit of a meeting and a photo-op with Chinese leaders and China uses this dogged pursuit of meetings to further its agenda.

Gallagher stated, “[T]he problem with this zombie engagement is that the CCP exploits our ardent pursuit of meetings and photo-ops as an opportunity to advance their agenda, their totalitarian, anti-American agenda. So, when filtered through the ideology of a Marxist-Leninist regime, that olive branch we’re eager to extend really becomes an invitation to aggression. And furthermore and finally, we slow-roll — in pursuit of sitting down at the table, we will slow-roll long overdue defensive actions like export licenses to Huawei, sanctions on genocidal CCP officials, transparency on the spy balloon and the Cuba spy base, just in order to get to the negotiating table. Thus, the price of zombie engagement is the death of commonsense steps we need to take to defend our country.”

Later, he added, “[J]ust look [at] what’s happened in the last five months as we’ve been chasing the CCP around the world. They raided the Beijing offices of three separate American firms, they targeted Micron in an effort to destroy its China business, they rebuffed our secretary of defense[‘s] attempts to talk to them, and then they nearly collided with American forces in the air and at sea during unprofessional intercepts.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett