Obama AG Sues Pentagon for Chinese Military Company, Prompting Stefanik to Blast Her for ‘Selling Out’

Obama-appointed attorney general Loretta Lynch is representing a U.S.-designated Chinese military firm in its lawsuit against the Pentagon, National Review has learned. This prompted Representative Elise Stefanik to accuse her of “selling out” to the Chinese Communist Party.

Shenzhen DJI Technology Company sued the federal government Friday, alleging that the Chinese-military label “violates the law and DJI’s due-process rights.” At issue is the Defense Department’s 2022 addition of DJI to its “Chinese military company” blacklist, a policy designed to counter China’s military-civil fusion strategy.

U.S. officials have long warned that the Shenzhen-based consumer drone manufacturer is tied to China’s defense-industrial complex, that DJI drones could be used for surveillance purposes in the U.S., and that the Chinese authorities have used DJI products in their mass surveillance of Uyghurs.

DJI has long contested these claims, and in the lawsuit said that the designation has caused the company to suffer “ongoing financial and reputational harms.”

Customs and Border Protection blocked the import of some DJI products to the U.S., citing a law that cracks down on the use of Uyghur forced labor, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Lynch, a partner at the Paul Weiss law firm, had written to the Pentagon in July 2023 as part of the effort to reverse the blacklisting. In that letter, excerpts of which NR reviewed, she asserted that “DJI demonstrated that it does not fit” the criteria for the label and that “the wide use and dependence on DJI products by a variety of U.S. stakeholders reinforces the importance and urgency of deleting DJI from the file.”

Lynch is listed as one of the attorneys representing DJI on the lawsuit, with the filing stating that her application to practice law in the U.S. district court of Washington is “forthcoming.”

In a statement to National Review, Stefanik — the author of a bill to block future DJI products from interacting with U.S. telecom infrastructure — said that Lynch “has turned her back on her nation, selling out to our greatest adversary Communist China and suing the United States on behalf of CCP-owned drone company DJI.”

“Not only is her lawsuit full of factual errors, it is also an obvious effort by DJI to distract from CBP’s recent halting of DJI imports due to Uyghur slave labor concerns and a futile attempt to disrupt the momentum behind my unanimously passed Countering CCP Drones Act,” she added.

Stefanik also said that DJI’s “sham lawsuit is not going to save them.”

A spokesperson for Paul Weiss did not immediately respond to a request for comment this morning.

Lynch is far from the first former senior U.S. official to represent a Chinese firm believed to have ties to Beijing’s military. After DJI’s lobbyists successfully killed legislation in 2022 that would have blocked federal agencies from procuring its drones, former representative Mike Gallagher slammed “lobbyists who’d rather sell out the country than lose a lucrative contract.”

Chinese firms’ use of the U.S. legal system has become a topic of interest on Capitol Hill in recent years. The House select committee on the CCP held a hearing last month focused on the use of “lawfare” by China-based companies to intimidate U.S. researchers and exploit America’s open legal system.