The committee on Oversight and Accountability on Thursday sent a letter to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC) John Kerry asking for the release of documents regarding his negotiations with China.
Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY) accuses Kerry of engaging with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “in activities that could undermine our economic health, skirt congressional authority, and threaten foreign policy under the guise of climate advocacy.”
The letter notes that Kerry’s SPEC role is a cabinet-level position created by President Biden which did not require a Senate confirmation. Comer sent a similar letter to Kerry during the last Congress, which he ignored, according to Comer’s office.
Outrage from Republicans comes after Kerry has made multiple comments suggesting a partnership with China despite them being “America’s chief geopolitical rival” and their egregious human rights violations and abuses.
In May 2022, Kerry told the Associated Press that he was working with China on creating a co-partnership of a new group focused on reducing carbon emissions. “My hope is that President Biden said very clearly, and President Xi agreed, in their first conversation, that climate should not be part of the bilateral differences between our countries,” Kerry said in an October interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Putting all human rights violations and pandemic-era abuses to the wayside, Kerry stated “Climate is not a bilateral issue. It’s a global, multilateral, existential threat to the world. And we both have responsibilities as the two largest emitters to try to cope with it.”
National Review writes that when Kerry has been presented with opportunities to condemn the moral atrocities carried out by Beijing he has dodged, insisting that his only goal is to shift Chinese behavior with respect to emissions, not human beings.
Specifically, during the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference last August, Kerry said China’s use of slave labor in Xinjiang for building solar panels was not his “lane.”