US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to assess espionage threat of ZTE at urging of senator
Ross promised Senator Ron Wyden a response ‘as promptly as possible’ while noting security issues were not his department’s area of concern
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been urged by a US senator to address whether his department believes that Chinese telecoms giant ZTE poses an espionage threat to the United States.
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, posed the question at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday concerning the recent deal by the Trump administration that saved ZTE from the brink of collapse and requested a written answer within a week from the commerce department to clarify its position on national security concerns.
Wyden said that keeping ZTE alive – as the administration had done when President Donald Trump ordered an end to a seven-year ban on US suppliers selling their components to ZTE – was in conflict with what William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Centre, said in testimony in May, when he declared that ZTE had been an espionage threat for years.
Ross agreed to provide a response “as promptly as possible”, while noting that his department had dealt with the issue of ZTE “in our domain, which is not espionage.” He said the department’s concern was “simply violation of export controls.”
Ross said that the US$1.4 billion in penalties for ZTE that his department came up with after Trump sought to set aside the seven-year ban was in its own way rigorous. “I think if it was our original decision, everybody would have applauded it,” he added.
The focus on ZTE, at a hearing to discuss Trump’s recent trade tariffs on China, highlights how entangled ZTE has become in the developing trade war between the two countries.