New U.S. Intelligence: ‘Endemic’ CCP Corruption, Organized Crime, and Graft Tied to Xi’s Network

WASHINGTON — An explosive new disclosure by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has pulled back the curtain on endemic corruption in the Chinese Communist Party—reaching the top echelons of power, including President Xi Jinping. Released as an unclassified document and drafted by ODNI’s National Intelligence Council, the report explains how graft, bribery, and political favoritism are an essential feature of CCP power structures, festering for decades, involving organized crime and factional struggles—even under Xi’s trademark anti-corruption campaign.

By publicly releasing these findings, U.S. officials are signaling a readiness to reveal what intelligence agencies have long documented but kept classified. Sources with knowledge of the matter indicate Washington appears increasingly willing to trace corruption and international money laundering directly to the Politburo, citing explosive cases such as a Western intelligence investigation that allegedly linked Xi Jinping’s cousin, Ming Chai, to a casino money-laundering junket in Australia.

In an era of sharply escalating tensions—spanning trade, technology, and territorial disputes—Washington’s move seems aimed at exposing internal vulnerabilities in Xi’s regime while also undermining the offshore money laundering and strategic corruption Beijing is believed to use for influence-building across the Western Hemisphere and the South Pacific. It offers American citizens a transparent glimpse into what the U.S. government views as key fault lines within China’s ruling party, as the world’s two most powerful states appear set on a collision course—driven in no small part by Xi’s urgent push to subsume Taiwan.

In a striking detail, the ODNI cites journalistic research, initially blocked by Bloomberg before eventually being reported by The New York Times in 2012, that tied immense family wealth to both then-Premier Wen Jiabao and the incoming President Xi. The Times reported that Wen’s immediate family controlled at least $2.7 billion in assets, while Xi’s siblings, nieces, and nephews collectively held more than $1 billion in business and real-estate holdings. Beijing promptly tightened its censorship apparatus in the report’s aftermath, curtailing foreign news outlets that delved into elite wealth.

“Xi may have urged family members to divest holdings as he came into power. However, industry research provides evidence that, as of 2024, Xi’s family retains millions in business interests and financial investments,” the ODNI report says. It adds that corruption cases reaching the highest levels—relying on open-source rather than classified U.S. intelligence—“shows corruption cases within the CCP Central Committee span leading officials overseeing a range of portfolios and projects.”

Among the examples cited is Zhang Wei, a Chinese businessman arrested in 2020 for “organizing, leading, and participating in organized crime; illegal detention; and illegal possession of firearms and ammunition,” before being found guilty the following year of illegally absorbing public deposits.

Another high-profile instance is Chen Gang, who was accused in 2019 of accepting over $18 million in bribes—some tied to his oversight of 2008 Beijing Olympics construction projects. More recently, in April 2024, Yao Qian, Director of the China Securities Regulatory Commission was investigated for “serious violations of discipline and law,” possibly connected to China’s Central Bank Digital Currency initiative.

The fact that Xi—who carefully cultivates an image of austere probity—has family members reportedly retaining millions of dollars in investments remains a deeply sensitive topic for Beijing. In highlighting these details, U.S. intelligence appears to be drawing attention to a broader governance model that incentivizes graft, even as Xi’s “tigers and flies” campaign claims to have taken down nearly five million officials since 2012.

The ODNI’s document underscores how Xi’s crackdown is not merely a legal imperative but also a party-directed instrument for punishing “political indiscipline and ideological impurity.”

“Although Xi has not used the campaign primarily to target his political rivals, a drive to eliminate competing power centers factored significantly into decisions made in the initial phases of the campaign. Early in Xi’s tenure, senior officials with ties to his predecessors were targeted with investigations and arrests,” the report says. “More significantly, political connections to high-ranking officials have not protected officials from prosecution, including those with close personal ties to Xi himself; the anti-corruption campaign has purged top officials considered loyal to Xi and who had risen under his patronage.”

Significantly, the ODNI highlights persistent corruption in the People’s Liberation Army—and a surge of high-level purges driven by Xi’s effort to consolidate control before the PLA’s target of full combat readiness by 2027, with Taiwan looming as the central focus. “In 2024, Xi stressed during a speech to military commanders that ‘the barrels of guns must always be in the hands of those who are loyal and dependable to the Party,’” the report states, adding that Xi’s emphasis on PLA loyalty “may also reflect concerns that corrupt practices will prevent the military from acquiring the capabilities and readiness he has directed it to achieve by 2027, in preparation for a potential conflict over Taiwan.”

The ODNI’s broader assessment emphasizes that corruption is not merely an occasional lapse but a systemic challenge to China’s governance, facilitated by centralized CCP power, a Party-centric concept of law, and minimal transparency. Studies suggest that corruption has persisted in China since its founding, intensified by rapid economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s, and has been so pervasive since 2000 that it threatens the very legitimacy of the regime.

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Related Topics:#TheBureau CCPCorruption ChinaGraft ChinaOrganizedCrime ChinaPresidentXi SamCooper

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I Was Hired To Root Out Bias At NIH. The Nation’s Health Research Agency Is Still Sick

Published on November 22, 2025

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Joe Duarte

Federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) continue to fund invalid, ideologically driven “scientific” research that subsidizes leftist activists and harms conservatives and the American people at large. There’s currently no plan to stop.

Conversely, NIH does not fund obvious research topics that would help the American people, because of institutional leftist bias.

While serving as a senior advisor at NIH, I discovered many active grants like these:

“Examining Anti-Racist Healing in Nature to Protect Telomeres of Transitional Age BIPOC for Health Equity” — Take minority teens to parks in a bid to reduce telomere erosion (the shortening of repetitive DNA sequences as we age). $3.8 million in five years and no results published – not surprising, given their absurd premise.

“Ecological Momentary Assessment of Racial/Ethnic Microaggressions and Cannabis Use among Black Adults” – This rests on an invalid leftist ideological concept – “microaggressions.” An example of a “microaggression” is a white person denying he’s racist. They can’t be validly measured since they’re simply defined into existence by Orwellian leftist ideology, with no attempt to discover the alleged aggressor’s motives.

“Influence of Social Media, Social Networks, and Misinformation on Vaccine Acceptance Among Black and Latinx Individuals” — from an activist who said the phrase “The coronavirus is genetically engineered” was “misinformation” and also conducted a bizarre, partisan study based entirely on a Trump tweet about recovering from COVID.

I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

The study claimed that people saw COVID as less “serious” after the tweet. I apologize for the flashback to when Democrats demanded everyone feel the exact level of COVID panic and anti-optimism they felt (and share their false beliefs on the efficacy of school closures, masks, and vaccines ). NIH funded this study and gave him another $651,586 in July for his new “misinformation” study, including $200,000 from the Office of the Director.

I’m a social psychologist who has focused on the harms of ideological bias in academic research. Our sensemaking institutions have been gashed by a cult political ideology that treats its conjectures and abstractions as descriptively true, without argument or even explanation, and enforces conformity with inhumane psychologizing and ostracism. This ideology – which dominates academia and NIH – poses an unprecedented threat to our connection to reality, and thus to science, by vaporizing the distinction between descriptive reality and ideological tenets.

In March, I emailed Jay Bhattacharya, Director of NIH, and pitched him on how I could build an objective framework to eliminate ideological bias in NIH-funded research.

Jay seemed to agree with my analysis. We spoke on the phone, and I started in May as a senior advisor to Jay in the Office of the Director (NIH-OD).

I never heard from Jay again beyond a couple of cursory replies.

For four months, I read tons of grants, passed a lengthy federal background check, started to build the pieces, and contacted Jay about once a week with questions, follow-up, and example grants. Dead air – he was ghosting me.

Jay also bizarrely deleted the last two months’ worth of my messages to him but kept the older ones. I’d sent him a two-page framework summary, asked if I should keep working on it, and also asked if I’d done something wrong, given his persistent lack of response. No response.

In September, the contractors working at NIH-OD, me included, were laid off. No explanation was given.

I have no idea what happened here. It’s been the strangest and most unprofessional experience of my career.

The result is that NIH is still funding ideological, scientifically invalid research and will continue to ignore major topics because of leftist bias. We have a precious opportunity for lasting reform, and that opportunity will be lost without a systematic approach to eliminating ideology in science.

What’s happened so far is that DOGE cut some grants earlier this year, after a search for DEI terms. It was a good first step but caught some false positives and missed most of the ideological research, including many grants premised on “microaggressions,” “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and other proprietary, question-begging leftist terms. Leftist academics are already adapting by changing their terminology – this meme is popular on Bluesky:

DOGE didn’t have the right search terms, and a systematic, objective anti-bias framework is necessary to do the job. It’s also more legally resilient and persuasive to reachable insiders — there’s no way to reform a huge bureaucracy without getting buy-in from some insiders (yes, you also have to fire some people). This mission requires empowered people at every funding agency who are thoroughly familiar with leftist ideology, can cleanly define “ideology,” and build robust frameworks to remove it from scientific research.

My framework identifies four areas of bias so far:

Ideological research
Rigged research
Ideological denial of science / suppression of data
Missing research – research that would happen if not for leftist bias

The missing research at NIH likely hurts the most — e.g. American men commit suicide at unusually high rates, especially white and American Indian men, yet NIH funds no research on this. But they do fund “Hypertension Self-management in Refugees Living in San Diego.”

Similarly, NIH is AWOL on the health benefits of religious observance and prayer, a promising area of research that Muslim countries are taking the lead on. These two gaping holes suggest that NIH is indifferent to the American people and even culturally and ideologically hostile them.

Joe Duarte grew up in small copper-mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find his work here, find him on X here, and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.

Daily Caller

Trump Gives Zelenskyy Until Thanksgiving To Agree On Peace Deal, With U.S. Weapons And Intel On The Line

Published on November 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

President Donald Trump is turning up the heat on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal to end his war with Russia, and has set a deadline with potential consequences.

The U.S. is warning that certain weapons shipments and intelligence sharing could be at risk if Zelenskyy does not play ball with Trump’s peace proposal, Reuters reported on Friday. The president set a Thanksgiving deadline for Zelenskyy to sign off on the details. Speaking with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio, Trump confirmed that date, saying that while deadlines can be extended, “Thursday is it.”

Speaking with Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio, Trump confirmed that, though deadlines can be extended, “Thursday is it.”

Zelenskyy signaled his willingness to discuss concessions outlined in the proposed peace deal despite objections from other European leaders over the terms, and said in a post on X that his whole government is at work on the individual points. However, the Ukrainian leader also said in a Friday video statement that the U.S. has put Ukraine in a position of “either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, said Friday Trump’s plan could “form the basis” for a final peace agreement.

A U.S. official told the Daily Caller News Foundation they “will not comment on sensitive peace discussions that may or may not have happened.”

“President Trump is working with both sides to end the war as quickly as possible, which has gone on for far too long, with too many senseless deaths,” the official said. “This would have never happened if he was President.”

Zelenskyy most recently has been embroiled in a corruption scandal, as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine launched a probe into Zelenskyy’s business partner, who allegedly laundered $100 million from Ukraine’s nuclear energy company.

“It was strongly implied to the Ukrainians that the United States expects them to agree to a peace deal,” another U.S. official told the DCNF. “Any changes will be decided upon by the President himself.”

The Ukrainian leader has been working to shore up support in Europe as well, most recently signing a deal with France to obtain 100 Rafale jets for its air force. The deal also included anti-air equipment, drones and other munitions.

The Trump administration has worked to offload direct military support for Ukraine to partners in Europe, with NATO agreeing to purchase U.S. weapons to then ship to Ukraine, instead of the American government delivering directly.