China's Escalating Espionage War Against The U.S.
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2025. I'm Dave Anthony. It's the latest Chinese threat. Instead of spying, smuggling. Three scientists are accused of bringing things here, including a dangerous fungus that might have threatened farm crops. The Chinese government doesn't need to, they don't like us at all, but they don't need to pick a fight with us. And

They know that agro-terrorism would unleash, especially under President Trump, it would unleash a response they really wouldn't want to have to deal with.

It was a dumb idea. I'm Jessica Rosenthal. Military recruitment is up across the branches and shows signs of increasing yet again in 2025. But after years of diminishing ranks, what happened? The numbers actually pick up even more when it was clear after the election that this administration, President Trump's administration, a return to lethality, a return, a very, very voice for his return,

to the meritocracy. And I'm Tommy Lahren. I've got the final word on the Fox News Rundown. Is this yet another way China is meddling in the U.S.? Already infamous for spying and stealing intellectual property and sending the deadly drug fentanyl here, three Chinese scientists have been charged with crimes in the past week for smuggling things into the U.S.,

Shengshuan Han, a student from Wuhan, was arrested and charged in a federal complaint after sending packages of roundworm biological material to the U.S. before coming here to do research at the University of Michigan.

This day is after two other Chinese scientists, Yang Kunjian and Zunyang Liu, got in trouble for bringing a dangerous fungus here that they also wanted to do research on at Michigan. Prosecutors claim Liu flew from China to Detroit in July of 2024 and stashed a dangerous pathogen in his backpack.

They say Customs and Border Protection found a wad of tissues crumpled up with a note in Chinese, a round piece of filter paper with circles drawn on it, and four clear plastic baggies with small clumps of plant material inside what the Justice Department calls a potential agro-terrorism weapon. That's Fox's Rich Edson. Now, Jian is in custody. Liu is not. He's back in China now.

Usually espionage involves taking stuff out, not smuggling stuff in. Jim Lewis is a former diplomat in the U.S. government's Senior Executive Service, currently a senior advisor at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My guess is it was...

some student who wanted to continue their research and couldn't get permission to do it so they smuggled stuff in that's not to say there is a lot of chinese espionage it's the most intense espionage campaign against the us we've ever seen but

Usually it's not people trying to smuggle stuff in unless they're drug runners and none of these were drugs. But the one in just this past week, the other day, this involves concealed worm specimens and they both these cases involve the University of Michigan. Is that odd to you?

No, because universities are really popular for Chinese students. They would want to come there. And the universities love them because they pay full fare, right? So they are a source of subsidy. But the Chinese have been spying on, they spy on everything. And so agriculture is just one of the things they spy on. My favorite story is still the Chinese scientist caught

crawling around a cornfield in the middle of the night in Iowa to pick up genetically modified seeds. They're eager to get ahead, and they know the U.S. is the place to come to do that. So the case that is the one from last week,

involves this fungus that they were bringing in. One of them was caught, this was last year, with this fungus trying to bring into the United States and study further at the University of Michigan. This was one that is being considered potentially agro-terrorism. Do you agree with that, that it should be looked at as that?

Probably not. I mean, some student wants to continue doing their research at a better facility in the US. The Chinese government doesn't need to, they don't like us at all, but they don't need to pick a fight with us. And they know that agro-terrorism would unleash, especially under President Trump, it would unleash a response they really wouldn't want to have to deal with. So

It was a dumb idea. It's part of a larger espionage effort, but I don't think it was agroterrorism. But this fungus is really potentially dangerous. They say economically, if it was unleashed, it could cause billions of dollars worth of economic losses. Crops like wheat and barley and rice can cause problems for people in your stomach, liver damage in the reproductive system. So, I mean, some might not agree with you that it's just somebody trying to do better research.

Well, this is back to the old COVID argument, which was, did it escape from a Chinese lab? And the answer is, we don't know, but there's always suspicion. So Chinese labs don't always have the same safety protocols that you see anywhere else in the world. And that means they're going to do things that are dangerous. You know, when they found this at Detroit, both of these cases came out of, you know, the Detroit airport. They found this in the Chinese nationals' luggage, right?

And obviously they weren't looking for fungus, but they did a pretty good job, I guess. You know, everyone from China is getting extra scrutiny. It may not be deserved, but in some cases it's certainly justified. And this is...

Something the Chinese brought on themselves because they do things like try and smuggle fungus in or try and smuggle microchips out. You know, there is concern in farm parts and rural parts of the United States of the Chinese buying up farmland. Is that something that is a goal of theirs? They want to expand like that in the U.S.? What is happening here?

Amazingly enough, I'm sure it's just a coincidence, a lot of these farms happen to be located next to military bases. And so that's a real concern that Chinese use

Of course that's coincidence. China wouldn't plan something like that. And it's happened so often that, you know, even anyone would be suspicious. So there's a couple of things going on. The first is it's part of an intelligence effort. If you locate next to an air base or a missile base or an army base, you can collect radio signals. You can observe what's going on. Second, and this is a hint about China, is

People in China are looking for ways to get their money out. They're not at all concerned about the US economy. They're concerned about the Chinese economy. And so we see this all the time. And a good way to do money laundering to get money out of China is to buy real estate in the United States. But

This is a blend of motives. Some of them are clearly espionage. That's why the laws have been changed to allow the U.S. to regulate foreign acquisitions of agricultural land. Some of them are just Chinese people with enough money who want to get it out of Beijing. Now, speaking of Chinese surveillance of military sites, remember the spy balloon? How can you forget?

Back in January 2023, it flew over Alaska and Canada and then across America for several days until it was finally shot down by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of South Carolina February 4th. The payload on the balloon was probably the size of a school bus. It was huge. And that's because it was crammed full of electronic gear.

Floating overhead gives you a chance to acquire people's cell phone calls, acquire their radio transmissions, acquire in-flight communications. The Chinese do this all the time over Guam, over Taiwan. And I guess they figured, well, what the heck, we'll give it a try against the United States. Turned out to be a bad idea, but that's what it was doing. It was basically a very low orbit spy satellite,

A little, nobody in their right mind would use a balloon because the balloon goes where the wind wants to go. And, you know, the Chinese kind of launched it and hoped it would float over something interesting. But it's not a good idea to be doing that to your neighbors because the intention was espionage. But did it float over anything interesting? Do you think they got something? I mean, there were people who wished that it was shot down.

I would have shot it down earlier. There was this concern, and so that's puzzling, the concern that it would fall on someone's head in Montana. There aren't that many people in Montana. Shoot it down and it's unlikely to bump into something. What we don't know because of the nature of the spacecraft or the aircraft, I guess it is, is how far out it could detect. Could it detect signals from five miles away?

Could it detect signals from 30 miles away? A lot depends on its collection range. And so if it was a 30 mile collection range, a 50 mile collection range, yes, it got some interesting stuff. That's why it was a good idea to shoot it down. Was it transmitting real time back to China? I mean, how is it working? Absolutely. So that's kind of how this whole thing works is there's

There's satellites. We have them. The Chinese have them. The Russians have them. Whose only job is to retransmit. So you get a collection like from the balloon. The signal goes up into space, rendezvous with the Chinese satellite, and then is retransmitted to China. You know, back to the students and we talked about the arrests here in the last week.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration, they want to revoke visas for a lot of Chinese students coming to the United States. Do you think that's the right move?

You know, I don't know if you saw, but the woman who gave the commencement speech at Harvard was Chinese, a Chinese student, not Chinese American. By the way, we've never had a case of a Chinese American being found spying for China. They know China and they don't like it. But this was a Chinese student, lives in China.

And she quoted from Xi Jinping. She quoted the Chinese Party's communist line in the commencement address. So I think jerking the chain a little bit is not a bad idea. The flip side of that is we tend to gain more. I've talked to university presidents and what they say is, look,

If you don't let me bring in Chinese students, 40% of my lab spaces will be unoccupied. My research will fall on hard times. So there's a benefit to having Chinese students. They pay full freight. They help with research. But there's a cost, which is some of them have political motives dictated by the Chinese state. Are they forced to? I mean, do they have to play?

Pledge an allegiance to the Communist Party before they come here? No, they don't have to pledge allegiance, but it's a mix. I mean, some of them are coerced. There's always the threat of coercion because your family's still back in China, and the Chinese government is not shy about saying, we'll threaten your family if you don't cooperate.

Others are looking to the future and saying, I want to get in good with the government, and so I'm going to help them out. So it's a mix of motives. Both apply. Artificial intelligence certainly is here, and it's growing, and it's creeping into everything.

Now, there is a report that says that there have been a lot of chat GPT misuses with OpenAI and the company basically says a lot of that comes from China. What are they trying to accomplish with chat GPT? They're trying to persuade you that China's rise is inevitable. It will be globally dominant and that the U.S. is wicked, corrupt and needs to be displaced.

That's the message. And you can see Chinese propaganda if you want. It's not that much fun, but that's their goal. We're the ones who are the future of mankind, and everyone should accept that China is the world's leader. They will say things like that sometimes, not always, but that's their goal, is to make the case China is a success, the U.S. is a failure. We're the ones you should bet on. Yeah, and it's that kind of Chinese propaganda that had—

Congress and President Biden signing the law to ban TikTok in the U.S. And President Trump's put that off trying to get a deal to have the Chinese parent company sell TikTok off and have, you know, get rid of that kind of a tie. Is that possible? Do you think it's the right move? Do you like the TikTok ban?

I think that you can come up with a deal, and they were very close to getting a deal, they may get one now, that does things like monitoring what software comes in from China, monitoring content, providing oversight of TikTok's operations in the US. I think there's a deal that would reduce risk to a manageable, even a negligible proportion. Right now, the Chinese are holding any TikTok deal hostage to the trade talks.

We've heard over and over again from officials, including the last FBI director, Christopher Wray, China is our number one threat. Do you agree? Completely. The Chinese are responsible for more than any other country in the world when it comes to espionage, even more than the Russians, the Iranians, you name it. China is number one when it comes to spying.

Jim Lewis, former diplomat with the Senior Executive Service in the U.S. government, senior advisor now for CSIS. Great to talk to you, Jim. Thanks so much. Thanks a lot. Put us in a box. Go ahead. That just gives us something to break out of. Because the next generation 2025 GMC terrain elevation is raising the standard of what comes standard.

As far as expectations go, why meet them when you can shatter them? What we choose to challenge, we challenge completely. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more.

I'm Emily Campagno, host of the Fox True Crime podcast. This week, Pulitzer Prize winning author Caroline Fraser joins me to discuss the cultural and environmental factors that shaped America's era of serial killers. Listen and follow now at FoxTrueCrime.com. This is Tommy Lahren with your Fox News commentary coming up.

President Trump went to Fort Bragg in North Carolina Tuesday afternoon and heaped praise on the U.S. Army. 250 years, we still proudly declare that we are free because you are strong. You are so strong. We're safe because you are strong.

Brave and America's flag will never fall because America's army will never, ever fail. Earlier in the day, his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth, appeared before a House Oversight Subcommittee, and one topic addressed was the surge in military recruitment. He gave credit to President Trump.

What changed is a commander-in-chief that America's young people believe in. At the end of the last fiscal year, the Army met its recruitment goal, even exceeded it, after failing to meet its goal for two years. This year, they met their goal four months early with 61,000 recruits.

At the end of the last fiscal year, the Navy met its recruitment goal for the first time in three years. And in the first four months of this fiscal year, they recruited over 14,000 people. Naval officials called that the highest recruitment number they've had in 20 years. But last year's goals were met six weeks before the president was elected. Former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said they put hundreds more recruiters in the field starting in late 2023 after efforts had stalled out during COVID.

Still, as recruitment numbers continue to soar this year ahead of schedule, Hegseth insists. President Trump was elected in November, inaugurated in January. And at first I called it the Trump bump.

But then it became clear that's not enough. This is a tsunami of support amongst young Americans who want to serve under a president who they know has their back. There are a number of efforts being made to increase the ranks, new programs, sign up bonuses. Secretary Hegseth says he's working on getting service members increases in pay. Yes. I mean, so the first thing you had after almost three years of extremely bad recruiting is

And the retention numbers were starting to get real soft. Brent Sadler is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and served in the Navy for 26 years. We spoke Tuesday. In all the services, because except for the Marine Corps. And the reason why that was is because the Biden administration had very explicitly said,

doubled down on diversity, equity, inclusion kind of themed recruiting efforts. The CIA also did the same thing and it alienated many people who tend to be more traditional and conservative in their viewpoints. It kind of alienated a lot of the normal recruitment pool. And so as soon as the services, Navy is really the first one, and also the Army in the band, started to correct the

their recruitment campaigns to move away from social or identity type issues back to issues of patriotism and national service.

They started to see the recruitment numbers pick up, and that's what you saw in last year. But President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, and I think SecDef deserves a lot of credit for this too, you actually see the numbers actually pick up even more when it was clear after the election that this administration, President Trump's administration, a return to lethality, a return, a very voice-first return,

to the meritocracy, which really is what matters when people are trying to kill you. You want to make sure that you can fight and defend yourself and your shipmates or your airmen, your folks in the foxhole with you. That's what matters, not the color of your skin or if you're disadvantaged in one way or the other. And so I think that actually had a rallying effect.

across the demographics, not just one group that might have been alienated before, but across the board. And I think that story has yet to be told more fully.

There are folks on the other side of the political aisle who will argue they think that Defense Secretary Hegseth's effort to eliminate DEI-related programs and materials from the military is hurting the military. Are you of the belief that we just don't have those numbers yet to say one way or another if it's helping or hurting recruitment?

I think there's quite a lot of empirical evidence that the DEI was perhaps the singular cause for the cratering of recruitment. Again, all the services except for the Marine Corps embraced DEI very visibly and very aggressively, and they all suffered recruitment. The Marine Corps didn't.

Then when you started to see recruitment efforts by like the Army and the Navy, most particularly still at the tail end of the Biden administration, you see an immediate reaction as people started coming back and joining the military. It had nothing to do with the economy because it was still in still the same bad position. So the control in this was – and the only factor that really changed was the embracing and then the moving away from DEI.

We know recruitment was held back early on in COVID, but I think folks like you and others we spoke with said, look, young people are just really unprepared. They were either too overweight, they were using drugs, there were some with felony records, and there was a lot of talk about that sort of interfering also with recruiting efforts. And I remembered we learned at that time about this effort, the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, and it was used by the Army. I think it's being used by the Navy now.

Do you think that is helping address some of those root cause type issues? Absolutely. I mean, it was I mean, just to kind of go roll the clock back for a moment, rather than to uplift and improve the health and the physical care capability of our new recruits.

Rather than do that, the Biden administration in its first year or two attacked that as ableism and would rather try to make excuses or change the standards, lower them so they could accept folks that really weren't physically ready for the rigors. Again, it's combat. There are bad guys trying to kill you.

And so we started to shift away from that. And thankfully, you saw programs like the armies that you mentioned. But I've also talked with the previous Secretary of the Navy, and I think the current Secretary of the Navy, I think should embrace programs like BOOST, which was discontinued in 2008. So there certainly is a physical epidemic of obesity and not being physically fit. But there's also a need to uplift many of those where our public schools are failing.

It's just a sad state that we are in the country right now that we've not paid attention to this, not at least since President Reagan's presidential fitness program really took off in the early 80s.

Yeah, I remember doing those sit-ups and push-ups. Brent, what about these numbers from at least from last year? It showed the recruitment was driven up mostly, I think this is the Army now, mostly by female enlistment as opposed to, I mean, there was still more male enlistment, it looks like, but it was more from women. What do you make of that?

Another striking outcome that you wouldn't expect when you're moving away from a favoritism in a DEI or you had quotas, basically recommitting to an egalitarian site, which the military has to be, to one based on meritocracy. You see groups that want to join because they are valued by what they bring to the military and what their potential is.

One of the critical topics at a Tuesday hearing at which Secretary Hegseth testified was the president's decision to deploy Marines to Los Angeles. Hegseth defended the decision. Every American citizen deserves to be, live in a community that's safe.

and ICE agents need to be able to do their job. They're being attacked for doing their job, which is deporting illegal criminals. President Trump believes in law and order, so he has every authority, and he has done mobilizing National Guard or active duty troops under U.S. code to protect federal agents in their job, which is exactly what we're doing, and we're proud to do it.

A staff member who appeared with Secretary Hegseth confirmed to the Congress members it's costing $134 million for a 60-day deployment. Brent, let me shift gears for a second here because I do want your thoughts on some of the news of the day.

And this decision, because Secretary Hexeth, before the subcommittee, he defended the president's decision to deploy the Marines to Los Angeles. He said the federal agents who are trying to work there need this protection. And the LAPD itself has said they're overwhelmed. We know that the state of California is suing over the president's deployment of the National Guard. But how big of a deal do you think this is to have the Pentagon involved in defending ICE?

So it's not the first time. There's been repeated cases where National Guard and the military has actually come in, usually with the governor's sanction or request. But this is the first time since 1965 when the president had to nationalize or federalize the National Guard and send them in to enforce civil rights actions in the mid-60s, 1965.

So not unique. There is laws that govern this. So it's also legal as well as there being precedent for it. When the apprehensions in L.A. triggered these riots, there was no movement and there certainly was no indication by both the mayor and the governor that they were going to allow their police forces to defend federal agents or support L.A.

let alone support their execution of federally mandated jobs and responsibilities.

Some are pointing out that President George H.W. Bush deployed the Guard during the L.A. riots, and I remember that. I was there. But they say this is different because by the time the Guard was deployed back then, people had died. How do you measure or contrast these two moments in history? Well, that's what we want to avoid, and what I think all law-abiding Americans want to avoid is the loss of life. And so getting control of the situation quick—

I'd already say by Friday afternoon and Friday night, this is already spiraling out of control. And that is when the mayor and the governor should have acted, but they didn't. And it spiraled out of control to a point to where they couldn't get things back into control. We're still seeing violence on the streets. This is not a protest. This is a riot. And so...

The difference is there's a lot more proactive action taken by the president, a willingness to actually federalize the National Guard and send in the military a lot earlier. If you recall during President Trump's first term, he hesitated both in acting early against Oregon. You had hundreds of police injured outside the federal judiciary building there in Portland, Oregon in the summer of 2020. And of course, Minnesota, Minneapolis burned for days because the governor failed to act.

So I think President Trump is taking a lesson from his own history and is acting proactively to protect Americans, but also constitutionally ensuring the strength of the republic by making sure that the federal powers are able to be executed without impediment in L.A. right now.

I know you have your ear to the ground on all things military, especially Navy, especially shipbuilding, submarines. Is anything else on your radar that you think is sort of highly important right now that you know the Secretary is focused on or should be? Well, shipbuilding is definitely one that's a high concern. I'm watching the movement to money from reconciliation and plans for the defense budget.

What I would say is very clear is that the Navy and shipbuilding has for too long been kind of a bill payer or has been a late bill to be paid. In other words, the contracting and the shipbuilding is late to task and also much over cost because we've delayed or we've strung out the bill plan longer than it should have been. So,

talks of moving or reducing the amount of resources to navy shipbuilding and the capacity i think would be misplaced so i'm watching very carefully how this plays out the reconciliation bill is a good good first step but more resources are needed to go to navy shipbuilding and it's going to take us a long time and it's going to be an expensive proposition to get the navy back to a footing to sustain the navy that's going to deter china let alone one that can defeat china

I wonder if you were once in the Navy. Thank you. Brent Sadler, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Amazon's Blink Video Doorbell. Get more at your door with the easy-to-install Blink Video Doorbell. Get more connections. Hey, I'm here for our first date. More deliveries. Hi, I have tacos for two. Oh, thanks. We'll be right down. And more memories.

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Rate and review the Fox News Rundown on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It's time for your Fox News commentary. Tommy Lahren. What's on your mind? California's inept governor refused to call in the National Guard to protect L.A., and now he and the rest of the morons who run the city and state are infuriated that President Trump did it for him. Now, the leaders of California believe, or at least they want you to believe, that sending in the National Guard to keep

the city from burning is the inflammatory part, not the people quite literally inflaming the city. Of course, the hacks of fake-stream media are happy to assist in that bogus narrative because in their minds, the violent and lawless rioters are the good guys with the noble cause.

President Trump was right to call in the National Guard to L.A. We learned in 2020 that if you allow thugs to go wild and unfettered, they will not stop until everything has been burned, looted, or otherwise destroyed. But as I keep telling you, L.A. is not savable. I'm convinced the leaders of that city and state want it to fail. There's no other explanation for the behavior. I'm Tomi Lahren, and you can watch my show, Tomi Lahren is Fearless, at Outkick.com. ♪♪

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