America should use the National Emergencies Act to seize and liquidate China’s assets in the U.S., including $1.1 trillion in treasury notes, said Gavin Clarkson, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy and economic development who is running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in New Mexico. He joined Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Dylan Gwinn.
In a March 30 column published by the Washington Examiner, Clarkson called on President Donald Trump to use emergency powers to confiscate all of China’s $1.1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and freeze the remainder of its assets as partial compensation for the one-party state’s negligence pertaining to the coronavirus outbreak.
Clarkson said, “I refer to [my proposal] as my “Frack China” strategy. Oil and gas — and hydraulic fracturing — is a big part of New Mexico’s economy. … What I’m proposing is to reach deep inside China, blow it apart from the inside, and extract out the things the United States needs, and first is compensation for the negligence of the Chinese Communist Party in inflicting this Chinese coronavirus around the world.”
Clarkson continued, “If you remember back to what happened with Iran when they took our embassy folks hostage back in 1979, the National Emergencies Act allowed the president to freeze their assets and, in some cases, liquidate their assets for the benefit of the United States.”
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“That law is still good law,” added Clarkson. “So when the president declared a national emergency on March 13th, that allowed the president to go after China’s assets — and China holds $1.1 trillion of U.S. treasury notes, but they’re not held in paper form in Beijing. They’re held in electronic form on a server in the United States.”
Clarkson went on, “Using that same statute — and the Supreme Court has said that statute’s still valid — we can actually deny China’s ability to even sue us in response, but we just go in and seize their assets, in less than 24 hours liquidate it, and we will reimburse the American taxpayer $1.1 trillion. But I would freeze the rest of China’s assets, as well.”
“I don’t ever remember us having Soviet Russia as a trading partner, and I don’t think we should be having communist China as a trading partner,” remarked Clarkson. “And, in fact, as my as my [Harvard] law school classmate Senator Tom Cotton says, we should be treating China as a pariah state just the same way we do North Korea.”
American public opinion on China is shifting, observed Clarkson. He said, “I think there’s been a major awakening in the United States because I think everybody who is suffering right now from the economic shutdown knows exactly who’s to blame, and it’s China. You can have overzealous governors, you know they’re trying to demonstrate too much power and control, but in reality, the Communist Chinese regime is singularly responsible for the personal and economic devastation throughout the globe.”
Clarkson stated, “China is responsible. We need to make China pay. … I think there’s going to be a lot of interest in extracting compensation for the negligence of the Communist Chinese regime,” determined Clarkson, “and if we can turn that into providing incentives to repatriate our manufacturing base and securing our critical supply chains, I’m all for it.”
The Republican primary for U.S. Senate New Mexico will be on June 2, with the general election scheduled for November 3. Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), the 71-year-old incumbent, announced in March 2019 that he would not seek re-election in the 2020 race.
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