Rumors that Wendi Deng, the ex-wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is a Chinese spy have been circulating for years.
Deng, born and raised in China but now a naturalized American citizen, has known Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, for a long time.
According to the WSJ, counterintelligence officials did not accuse Deng, Kushner, or Ivanka Trump of any wrongdoing, but had made an effort “to highlight to Mr. Kushner, who was new to government, the need to be careful in his dealings with people whose interests may not align with those of the U.S.”
There have been documented accounts of Deng’s interactions with former Chinese Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin and his faction. In journalist Wendy Goldman Rohm’s 2001 book, “The Murdoch Mission: The Digital Transformation of a Media Empire,” she describes a private dinner with then-leader Jiang, top Chinese officials, Murdoch, his son, James Murdoch, and Deng. The meeting was an effort to help forge the media empire’s business ties in China, James having recently been appointed by his father to head the Asian broadcaster Star TV.
It doesn’t help that the Chinese regime has inadvertently added fuel to the spy rumors.
As it happens, the recent Kushner revelations also contain connections to Jiang. According to the WSJ report, U.S. officials had expressed concern over a counterintelligence assessment that Deng was lobbying for a $100 million Chinese garden—funded by the Chinese regime—to be constructed at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Intelligence officials deemed the project a national security risk because the garden plans included a 70-foot-tall tower that could potentially be used for surveillance.
The deal for the garden was brokered by Jiang Zehui, Jiang’s cousin and then-head of the state-run research institute, Chinese Academy of Forestry, in 2003.
The project has since been shelved due to counterintelligence concerns, according to WSJ.
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