Did Biden Administration Cut Video Feed To Keep the Chinese Communist Party Happy?

By 

Jordan Sekulow

|
December 13, 2021

5 min read

Foreign Policy

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President Biden invited Taiwan to his Summit for Democracy last week and then appears to have censored them. Digital Minister of Taiwan Audrey Tang presented at the Summit, but the video was conveniently cut out after the Minister showed a map that indicated that Taiwan is separate from China. The White House then reportedly contacted the State Department to remove this part of the video. The State Department claimed that this glitch with screen-sharing was “an honest mistake.”

Was this intentional to appease China? We know that the Chinese Communist Party would have censored any visuals showing Taiwan as independent and not a part of China.

We’ve seen this before when dealing with Iran. We are already considering a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out why this video was deleted, who authorized it, and more. ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett gave his take on this “glitch.”

First of all, they have to be straightforward with the American people. When it was talking about the Iran video, they came out and said it was a glitch. We now know it was not a glitch because of the investigation – from the FOIA response that we gave. That’s got to take place in this as well. They want to say this was a technical problem. All signs, to me, point that this was a version of viewpoint discrimination. They put up something that the White House didn’t agree with.

ACLJ Senior Military Analyst Wes Smith explained our relationship with China in his new article and added:

Our official policy towards Taiwan is what is called strategic ambiguity. . . . It means that ever since the 1970s, when Nixon reached out to China and we established an official relationship with them, they wanted us to adopt a One China Policy that there is one Chinese people, one Chinese government . . . which includes Taiwan, but here again it becomes ambiguous. Because we embrace a One China policy, and yet we also recognize the right of Taiwan to be an independent democratic territory of China. So, it’s not only ambiguous, it is confusing. . . . We have strategic ambiguity. What we need is strategic clarity.

ACLJ Senior Advisor for National Security and former Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell pointed out how this happened:

The woke culture has infiltrated into the Pentagon, into the State Department, and into our foreign policy. . . . Of course, we have a One China Policy, everybody knows that, but we shouldn’t be in the position of censoring people and telling other countries that they can’t bring up certain diplomatic points. . . . It’s really indicative of what the progressives want to see, which is a silencing of debate and an inability to see other people's points of views. 

President Biden and his team continue to silence the debate when it comes to abortion. As more courts are starting to hear legal challenges to Roe v. Wade, the Left is panicked. ACLJ Senior Counsel Geoff Surtees discussed our recent pro-life case:

We are filing an amicus brief with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in defense of an important Pennsylvania law that bars state funding of abortion through its medical assistance program. . . . The challengers of this law – Planned Parenthood and a group of abortion providers – they are arguing that this abortion-funding ban violates not the U.S. Constitution but the Pennsylvania state constitution, which they claim provides greater protection to Pennsylvania citizens than the U.S. Constitution does. We make two arguments in the brief: First, the abortion providers don’t have legal standing to press their challenge here. . . . The second point we make in this brief is that because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has held . . . that it looks to the United States Supreme Court for interpretive guidance on how it understands its state constitution, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court should reject this challenge . . . on its merits, just as the United States Supreme Court has done so when those have challenged federal Medicaid restrictions on abortion funding. . . . It is an important case, and this case reflects what if the United States Supreme Court sends these issues back to the states, we are going to see all of this fighting, not just in the legislatures, but in the state judiciaries as well.

We are ahead of this, dealing with abortion at the state level now. So that when the Mississippi case comes back down returning the power to the states when it comes to abortion, we are ready to fight in the state legislatures. We are able to be on the offensive instead of just defending laws. The ACLJ is front and center on this issue at the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in South Dakota.

Today’s full Sekulow broadcast is complete with even more analysis of Biden’s team cutting the Taiwan minister’s portion of the speech given at the Summit for Democracy, and a pro-life case in Pennsylvania.

Watch the full broadcast below.

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