Remember back in the summer of 2024 when Arkansas’ agriculture secretary made the specious suggestion that a Fort Smith industrial property purchase by an American suitcase manufacturer was actually probably a sinister Chinese spy operation?
Gov. Sarah Sanders and her team burst into xenophobic overdrive at the opportunity to fear-monger over purported threats from communist China, blustering that the property’s proximity to a National Guard base catapulted this Fort Smith real estate transaction to the level of a national security concern.
There is “reasonable suspicion of ownership ties with China and the Chinese Communist Party as well as national security concerns associated with the site’s proximity to Ebbing Air National Guard Base,” Sanders and Agriculture Secretary Wes Ward said in their now laughable July 23, 2024, letter to Attorney General Tim Griffin, requesting an investigation.
Within weeks, of course, the ruse was up. Griffin put out a statement on Aug. 13, 2024, confirming they had not uncovered any Chinese ties. There was no plot here by the Chinese Communist Party to manufacture or distribute exploding suitcases in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
As the Arkansas Times reported at the time, “internal emails among state government staffers and officials, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, suggest the state knew Olivet was behind the land purchase even before publicly announcing an investigation, raising questions about the politics behind it all.”
Olivet includes some executives with family ties to Taiwan, an American ally with a highly strained relationship to China. Taiwan’s official sovereign state name, the Republic of China, looks to have caused some confusion for Sanders and company. The muddle was such that the infamous Alexa Henning, Sanders’ communication director at the time, appears to have conflated China and Taiwan, and then word-smithed communications about Olivet to cast the company in a most sinister light.
Huge props and a big raise (surely) to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette federal court reporter Dale Ellis for his stellar story today about the fallout from an amateur and embarrassing misinformation campaign that rivals only lecterngate as a display of ineptitude in the Arkansas Governor’s Office.
Ellis mined court documents to get his mitts on text threads among Arkansas Attorney General Office staff that bring into sharp relief the Sanders’ administration’s callous disregard for truth, and their willingness to lie and harm people and businesses who haven’t broken any laws if it helps them score political points.
In the texts, Griffin and his staff call the governor’s ploy to paint an empty Fort Smith factory in communist red “a comms stunt,” and rightfully accuse the Sanders administration of “comms before substance.” Deputy Attorney General Alex Benton tells her colleagues she asked the governor’s office to do their due diligence before going public with accusations that Olivet was a Chinese agent. She was rebuffed. “[Governor’s staffer Chafer Stanley] said they would rather have a media hit and have to walk it back later,” Benton wrote on a thread that included a half dozen AG staffers, including the AG himself.
Asked about these embarrassing revelations during a morning press conference about test scores, Sanders pulled her usual deflect-and-attack routine. Sanders did not acknowledge the lies and misinformation her office churned out. She went on the offensive instead, suggesting a Chinese threat still lurks among us.
“I think it is a fundamental responsibility of our state, and frankly of our federal government, to protect from Chinese infiltration,” she said.
You can watch that spiel at the 31-minute mark here.
