A former Obama administration official is providing legal services to a company the Department of Defense (DOD) asserts has deep ties to the Chinese military.
Loretta Lynch, who served as former President Barack Obama’s attorney general from 2015 to 2017, is one of five attorneys from the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison listed as representing Chinese drone manufacturer DJI in a lawsuit filed October 18 challenging the Pentagon’s designation of the drone company as a “Chinese military company,” court documents show. The DOD added DJI to its Section 1260H entity list of “Chinese military companies” in 2022, meaning that it determined the drone manufacturer is “directly or indirectly owned, controlled or beneficially owned by” the Chinese armed forces or otherwise complicit in supporting the Chinese military-industrial complex.
“Barack Obama’s former Attorney General Loretta Lynch has turned her back on her nation, selling out to our greatest adversary Communist China and suing the United States on behalf of CCP-owned drone company DJI,” Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik said on Monday. “Not only is her lawsuit full of factual errors, it is also an obvious effort by DJI to distract from CBP’s recent halting of DJI imports due to Uyghur slave labor concerns and a futile attempt to disrupt the momentum behind my unanimously passed Countering CCP Drones Act. DJI’s time in the United States is rightfully coming to an end and Loretta Lynch’s sham lawsuit is not going to save them.”
Stefanik has been a leading advocate in Congress of legislation to ban DJI drones from operating in the United States over national security concerns.
The Lynch-backed DJI lawsuit claims that the drone manufacturer “is neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military and … sells only ‘consumer and commercial’ — not military — drones” and that the DOD has failed to produce evidence to support its assertion to the contrary, ignoring meeting requests with the company. DJI also alleges that the Pentagon has caused “ongoing financial and reputational harm” to the company.
The whole plan of barack HUSSEIN obama was a slow take over of the United States. So slow no one realized it was taking place. Trump foiled his plan and lets hope he can put an end to this destruction of the greatest country ever. We