WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking and Foreign Relations Committees, today joined The Big Money Show on Fox Business to discuss Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan’s egregiously unlawful and damaging regulatory overreach and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) repeated violations of American sovereignty, including recently reported surveillance stations across the United States and hacking of Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and State Department officials’ email accounts.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on FTC Chair Khan’s failed strategy and loss in the Microsoft-Activision case: “Her strategy seems to be based on theology, not the rule of law. And I think this court—again, a Biden-appointed judge has turned this action down. I think what we’re seeing is an agency that’s well beyond its remit. They should be looking at these mergers for anti-competitive activity that would harm American consumers. In fact, they’re looking for anything but that. This just seemed to be against any type of consolidation. It’s so bad, in fact, that I recently had to file an Amicus Brief in a similar case with the FTC, where they are actually blocking a merger that would increase the production of cancer detection tests that would save lives in America. They’re literally against that. It makes no sense. We need to rein in this theology and get them back to the rule of law […] This viewpoint, [which] seems to be shared broadly across the Biden Administration, is that central control is what’s best. [It] certainly sounds like the CCP to me, not like the American economy that you and I grew up in.”
Hagerty on the CCP violating American sovereignty: “It really is unbelievable how egregious Chinese behavior has been. The CCP is literally violating our sovereignty every day. It’s been estimated by the U.S. government that they’re stealing roughly $600 billion worth of our intellectual property every year. That’s getting close to the entire Department of Defense budget here in America when you think about the magnitude of that. Now you look at what’s happened here with our Secretary of Commerce; you look at what’s happening with [China] floating a spy balloon over America, hacking our situation in Guam, our bases there, putting these surveillance stations in the United States. Senator [Marsha] Blackburn and I were joined by other of our colleagues demanding that we do an investigation into this. I mean, the FBI’s got to step up and do their job. We need to be pushing back, and the last thing we should be doing is sending senior officials to China in the midst of all of this, doing this photo-op diplomacy.”
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