A Slave Labor Debacle Debases the Situation Room
Fresh off their heated, “f**k”-encrusted shouting match in China, tensions and policy fissures between Donald Trump advisers Steve Mnuchin and Peter Navarro are at an all-time high…. Navarro has—according to multiple sources who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity—privately nicknamed Mnuchin “Neville Chamberlain” (in reference to the Conservative British prime minister famous for his foreign policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler) and likened the economic threat from China to that of fascist dictator Hitler.
—The Daily Beast, May 24, 201841
Here’s a funny story about this dust-up reported by the Daily Beast. It’s a story that may help shed a useful spotlight on my four-year-long feud with Neville Mnuchin.
In May of 2018, Bob Lighthizer and I jumped on Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department plane with a gaggle of National Security Council staffers and headed to Beijing for what would be our one and only round of major trade talks with the Chinese on their home turf.
This trip to the Far East immediately went south when Mnuchin unilaterally decided at breakfast just before the talks began that he would conduct one-on-one negotiations directly with China’s chief negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, rather than allow the rest of us to participate. Yep, we had just flown seven thousand miles only to have Stupid Stevie, rather than the Chinese, be the first to screw us.
Both Lighthizer and Terry Branstad, the ambassador to China, were predictably livid at Mnuchin, but I was the only one who bothered to speak up. In fact, I got right up in Steve’s big-nosed ugly grill right outside the meeting hall and didn’t let up until he agreed to back down and at least let Lighthizer into his stupid little negotiating party.
Mnuchin’s gambit was indeed stupid. Through the eyes of the Chinese, we as a team lost considerable face, and the episode was a particular embarrassment to Lighthizer, the guy who was supposed to be our real chief negotiator.
The net result was that Mnuchin considerably weakened our negotiating position at the very beginning of what were already very sensitive negotiations.
That night, in a long dinner in which every course served seem to get weirder—to the point where I didn’t even know what I was eating by the end—the Chinese purposely isolated Lighthizer. They did so by seating poor forlorn Bob alone in the middle of a huge table, with no one within ten feet of him on either side. Meanwhile, directly across from Bob at another huge table, our Communist hosts treated Mnuchin like an emperor, feting him with conversation and fawning all over him.
I wondered at the time whether I, with my cross-cultural training as a Peace Corps volunteer, was the only one in the banquet hall to pick up on this Chinese trick. Certainly Steve Mnuchin had no clue.
Now here’s the funny part of the story: On the way home, somebody in the flight crew must have had a keen sense of history—or at least humor—because they showed the film Darkest Hour.
This glorious piece of cinema tells the tale of Winston Churchill’s own dustup in the 1930s with Great Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Minister Lord Halifax. Churchill’s fight comes as he is jockeying to become prime minister in the face of unrelenting Nazi aggression—which both Chamberlain and Halifax repeatedly appeased.
After the movie was over, a number of us congregated in the aisles, and at one point, one of the National Security Council staff made the comparison between Trump battling the Chinese Communist Party and Churchill fighting the Nazis. When another staffer asked: “If Trump is Churchill, who is Neville Chamberlain and who is Lord Halifax in this administration?”
Of course, the hands-down, no question about it consensus was Mnuchin as Neville Chamberlain. There was, however, a split over Lord Halifax. Some folks thought it was Kushner, while at least to me, it was unquestionably Larry Kudlow.
At any rate, several weeks later, the Daily Beast would, as the lead-off quote to this chapter indicates, accuse little old me of christening Mnuchin as the “Neville Chamberlain” of our time, but I always like to give credit where credit is due. In this case, it was clearly a group decision made somewhere over the skies of Alaska on our way home to the DC Swamp.
After the Beasty story broke and the next time we were in the Oval Office, Mnuchin began to whine in front of the Boss about how I could possibly call poor Stevie “Neville Chamberlain.” After all, it was the evil Chamberlain who had surrendered Europe to those far eviler Nazis who had killed so many of Stevie’s Jewish ancestors.
All I could think of at the time—besides how weak Mnuchin looked in front of the president—was this. In fact, I didn’t just think this. I said it right out loud to the Munchkin’s face:
Hey, Neville, knowing what you know about what the Nazis did to the Jews, how is it that you don’t give a flying puck about what the Chinese Communists are doing to two million Uighurs in the concentration camps of Xinjiang Province? Oh, and let’s not forget about the ethnic cleansing in Tibet. What do you say about that Stevie?
Fast forward now to Thursday, September 10, 2020, and yet another showdown and throw down, this time in the White House Situation Room. On this day, Mnuchin, Lighthizer, Kudlow, and I along with several high-ranking officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) march solemnly into the Sit Room, having been démarched by an overwrought Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Overwrought, by the way, was pretty much Mark’s daily state of existence at the White House. Talk about being emotionally under-equipped and overwhelmed by a job.
In this case, the Chief’s Chief Crybaby was needlessly trying to put the kibosh on a long overdue action by DHS against Communist China. This action was related to the proliferation of China’s aforementioned Soviet-style cum Nazi concentration camps and slave labor factories in China’s Xinjiang province. And when I say Soviet-style, I mean it literally—China’s own gulags were largely constructed in the era of Mao Zedong using blueprints imported from the Soviet Union.
At any rate, I have made passing reference to Beijing’s notorious gulags numerous times; but given the magnitude of what would be yet another Mark Meadows screwup, it may well be worth a little detail to lay the Adolf Eichmann-Josef Mengele predicate for this final installment of the saga of the Trump administration’s pulled punches.
So let’s start with the observation that since the days after Chinese Communist Party forces took Xinjiang in 1949 and Tibet in 1950 at the point of some very big guns, the CCP has conducted a widespread and persistent ethnic, cultural, religious, and genocidal cleansing of the Buddhist population in Tibet and the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
In this ongoing pogrom with Chinese characteristics, the CCP effectively bans most forms of religious worship. It has also destroyed large swathes of temples, mosques, and religious artifacts.
Then, there is this abomination: To quite literally breed the Tibetan and Uighur populations out of existence—and in a more subtle form of ethnic cleansing than a bullet to the head—Tibetan and Uighur women are exported to other parts of China not only to toil in factories. They are also forced to breed with so called “leftover” Han Chinese men who find Han Chinese women to be in short supply because of China’s One Child Policy.
As for the Uighur and Tibetan men, they are forced to toil by the millions in slave labor hubs for the various kinds of commerce conducted in Tibet and Xinjiang—from cotton and tomato farming to the production of hair products and other light manufacturing.42
The “lucky” prisoners in these concentration camps work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week making baubles for export to Walmart and other big box retailers in the West. The unluckiest prisoners are those who, ironically, may be the healthiest and strongest.
These fine physical specimens, like their brethren in China’s beleaguered Falun Gong community, often wind up first anesthetized while their organs and retinas are removed. After thus servicing the CCP’s thriving organ trafficking scheme, these poor carved up souls are then cremated—often while still alive—with their ashes then scattered to the winds.43
The Curious Case of the Missing WRO
To say that people like Mnuchin, Kudlow, and Meadows, along with officials from the broader Trump administration like Kushner, should have acted to put a stop to this post-Auschwitz depravity right at the beginning of Trump’s tenure is to also say that Barack Obama and Joe Biden should have done it before we Trump folks ever got there. But, I guess, with the kind of tough actions DHS was proposing that day in the Situation Room, it was a case of better late than never—although Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was about to violently disagree with even that.
So let’s start that story with this excerpt from the press release that was eventually issued by the Department of Homeland Security after Meadows effectively gutted the DHS proposal:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued five Withhold Release Orders (WRO) today on products from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The products subject to the WROs are produced with state-sponsored forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the Chinese government is engaged in systemic human rights abuses against the Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minorities.
“By taking this action, DHS is combating illegal and inhumane forced labor, a type of modern slavery, used to make goods that the Chinese government then tries to import into the United States. When China attempts to import these goods into our supply chains, it also disadvantages American workers and businesses,” said Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli.44 [emphasis added]
Here’s the teaching point: What sometimes is left out of a press release is far more important than what is actually in it. What was left out was any mention of a sixth withhold release order.
After months of preparation, DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli and Commissioner Mark Morgan at Customs and Border Protection had indeed teed up a full six pack—not just five—of these WROs. These neat little hammers would empower CBP agents to block the import of any goods made in Communist China using forced labor in Xinjiang. However, over the weekend, Meadows had gotten wind of the pending DHS announcement and went into a full-blown, Al Haig, “I’m in charge” panic mode.
It still remains unclear to me why Meadows reacted so negatively to the idea of cracking down on concentration camps in China. Maybe it was a pointed call from Mnuchin. Maybe it was a missive from Meadows’s erstwhile babysitter and real White House Chief of Staff Jared Kushner. But be that as it may, Meadows was hell-bent on stopping the DHS action.
And here is why Washington is sometimes so deliciously and leakfully evil. When Meadows called Cuccinelli and Morgan and told them to put a halt on their WROs, these gentlemen—and true patriots of the Trump movement—were incensed at this interference from the White House, and for two very good reasons.
First, the Department of Homeland Security had every right to exercise its authority in the matter. It really did not have to ask for the White House’s permission.
Second, despite its autonomy in this matter but in deference to the White House, CBP had actually agreed to go through a full White House staff secretary process, and after weeks of delay, it had received full approval. So at that point, the coast for throwing that full roundhouse punch of six WRO orders should have been clear.
Neither of these reasons are the delicious part of the story, however. The delicious part is that somebody leaked to the anti-Trump rag Politico that Meadows was about to go weak on China yet again by blocking the WROs, and one of their reporters had called Meadows for comment. So when Meadows walked into the Situation Room, he was apoplectic at the leak.
Deliciously, that leak had backed Meadows into a political box where he could not just kill all of the WROs. He at least had to do something if he didn’t want to look like a hardhearted Chinese Nazi himself.
Of course, understanding his dilemma, Meadows burst into the Sit Room that afternoon hotter than a counterfeit Chinese power strip. He then proceeded to rip Morgan and Cuccinelli two new ones for the leak.
Now, Mark Morgan, who is always a gentleman and one of my favorite patriots in America, might well put up with that kind of abuse from Meadows. But Ken Cuccinelli? Nope. Ken doesn’t take that kind of crap from anybody. So there were rhetorical fireworks right at the outset, with Ken pushing back at Meadows hard!
In the ensuing discussion, Steve Mnuchin initially wanted to do nothing at all. As per his usual tactic, the Neville Chamberlain of our time—I never get tired of writing that—instead asked for a delay so that WROs could go back, as he whined, “properly through process.”
At that point, I told Mnuchin in no uncertain terms that all six WROs had gone through a full process and been approved at the deputy level at both Treasury and USTR, and the NSC’s Matt Pottinger—silent to that point—agreed as he had chaired the process.
Now at this point you might think I’m about to tell you that Cuccinelli and Morgan won this epic showdown; but au contraire. Meadows was the Chief, after all, and he decided that instead of approving all six of the WRO’s like both Good Process and morality required, Meadows would agree to only five.
Ok. That seems pretty good, doesn’t it? Certainly, five of the six orders approved seems like way more than a glass half full.
But here was the very big Meadows-Mnuchin catch—and it was this catch that was conveniently left out of the DHS press release:
The one withhold release order that would be left off the list accounted for fully 80 percent of the cotton and cotton production that would be affected. That’s right, 80 percent.
Of course, the press would light us up for yet another pulled punch. And here yet again, there was this high irony:
We as an administration took what was actually at least a semi-tough, five-of-six WRO action, yet because of the way we very publicly mishandled it, all our efforts did was make POTUS look weak on China yet again.
As a coda to all of this, I am at least pleased to report that Cuccinelli and Morgan dropped that sixth and last WRO on China after the election—and if you are curious, they did not ask for Mark Meadows’s permission.