By: Robert Schmad, Daily Caller News Foundation
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 Treasury and Commerce Departments have also sanctioned DJI for providing the Chinese government with surveillance drones to spy on Uyghur Muslims in the far western region of the country, The New York Times reported. Secretaries of State under both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have said that the Chinese repression of Uyghurs has escalated to the level of genocide.
Independent researchers have also discovered that the app DJI tells users to download in order to pilot its drones collects large quantities of personal data that the Chinese government could potentially access, according to the NYT.
This isn’t Lynch’s first attempt to help DJI escape the scrutiny of the DOD. The former attorney general in July 2023 wrote a letter to the Pentagon urging it to remove DJI from the 1260H entity list, according to National Review.
DJI and other Chinese military companies have spent millions over the past couple of years to retain lobbyists to fight legislation aimed at limiting their operations in the United States. In the process of doing so, the firm retained a number of former senior staffers from top congressional offices in an effort to bolster its influence operation.
DJI also spends an undisclosed amount supporting the Drone Advocacy Alliance, a political advocacy group that has been attempting to sway lawmakers against legislation that would limit the domestic availability of Chinese drones.
Lynch and DJI did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
