Thomas Zimmerman, who will serve as special assistant to the next President Joe Biden on personnel matters, has served as a visiting scholar at what the FBI calls a front-line organization for “Chinese intelligence gathering and overseas spy recruitment,” according to the National Pulse. “Zimmerman was a visiting scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in China, which the FBI calls a frontline organization for Chinese intelligence gathering and overseas spy recruitment. Zimmerman was also the deputy leader of the Biden transition team for national security personnel, but the transition website’s bio makes no mention of his ties to Chinese think tanks.
The FBI believes that the institution has close ties to China’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, and that senior Communist Party officials often use the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences to conceal their identities and use its employees to recruit spies overseas.
In 2019, SHS was also involved in the criminal case of Kevin Mallory, a retired U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who sold classified U.S. defense documents to China in 2107, and Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a U.S. federal court last year. His court documents show that he was recruited by a Chinese intelligence officer at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences as a spy.
An article on the website of the U.S. nonprofit Homeland Security Today described Zimmerman’s ties to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, where he was a “visiting scholar” focusing on “Afghanistan, Somalia and Chinese regional policy.
Zimmerman also “led an academic salon” at the Shanghai Institute for American Studies (SIAS) with Chinese Communist advisor Li Lifan on “counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, security issues in Central Asia, U.S. views on the Belt and Road Initiative, and security issues in South Asia.
The Shanghai Institute for American Studies is funded by the Chinese Communist Party and “provides advisory services to central government and local policymakers” in China.
Last August, the FBI targeted and investigated the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think tank, because of its partnership with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. The Brookings Institution employs many former U.S. government officials and more than 20 foreign policy advisers to the Biden campaign. Therefore, there are questions that China is likely to use the partnership with the think tank to spy on the United States.
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