On February 21, a month after the President’s inauguration, a woman named Angela Chen bought a penthouse worth $15.8 million. The penthouse was in the Trump Park Avenue building in New York City.
She bought the penthouse from a business owned by Donald Trump. H’mmm.
Ms. Chen is a Chinese American business woman who runs a firm called Global Alliance Associates. The firm acts as a liaison between American companies that want to make deals with Chinese businesses. It claims to have connections with the most powerful people in China. Their job is to provide access to those powerful people.
Angela Chen also works for the U.S. arm of a non-profit called the China Arts Foundation. That group is linked, according to Mother Jones, with both China’s powerful elites and the Chinese military intelligence service.
The China Arts Foundation, which was formed in 2006, is run by what the Chinese call a “princeling.” That’s the terms used to describe the children of former Communist Party officials and officers. In this case, the princeling is the daughter of the Revolutionary leader Deng Xiaoping. Her name is Deng Rong.
Stay with me here; this gets convoluted.
Deng Rong is also the Vice President of a group called China Association for International Friendly Contacts. The interestingly named group is part of the propaganda and intelligence arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The PLA is the Chinese Army.
So you can see that there is a long and winding road between the President of the United States and the most powerful political, business and military leaders in China. This is a problem.
The question, of course, is why Ms. Chen decided to buy that particular condo from the Trumps. Did she simply like the view, or was all of this an effort to buy access to the President on behalf of the Chinese power elite? Or the Chinese government?
Who knows?
When asked by the media to answer those questions, neither side would speak on the record. Neither had anything to say, other than to admit that the purchase happened.
This means that we are all left with the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that something is going on here.
And of course all of this comes only days after the family of Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, worked out a deal to make hundreds of millions of dollars in a real estate deal with a Chinese business.
Here we go again. The continuing saga of President Trump’s business dealings makes it even more important for his taxes to be revealed.
The conflicts of interest are mind boggling. We’ve spent months wondering about Trump’s ties to Russia. Now we need to start worrying about China.
Featured image via Pixabay.
