Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that, if enacted, would force the Chinese-owned tech company ByteDance to sell TikTok within 180 days. If it doesn’t comply, the app will be banned in the U.S. The bill is currently under consideration in the Senate, whose members are being lobbied ferociously by the company. Earlier this month, Pirate Wires’ own Mike Solana documented how Trump’s 180 on TikTok — a company he had previously tried to force divestiture on — seemingly came after a meeting with billionaire GOP donor and ByteDance investor Jeff Yass. But Trump isn’t the only one whose concerns about Chinese espionage seem to have been assuaged by the almighty dollar. Another is TikTok’s head of public policy, Michael Beckerman, the company's arch-defender in both Congress and the media. He's a slick-talking company man whose carefully calculated statements denying TikTok’s China connections reveal more than they conceal, at least to those who are willing to squint at them. 

Beckerman started his career as a legislative assistant to former Michigan Rep. Fred Upton in 2001. As a hill rat, he worked through several positions in Washington before eventually becoming deputy staff director at the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees U.S. internet policy, in 2011. A year later, he founded the Internet Association, a lobbying group representing numerous tech behemoths such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. While at the Internet Association, Beckerman took a hard line against China. He was especially critical of China’s longstanding refusal to allow American tech companies access to its markets, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2015 that “Global Internet companies born in the United States must have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field in China.” They can’t, and it’s particularly ironic that he now finds himself advocating for this off-balance status quo. China’s ongoing “fair trade for thee but not for me” tech policy would be reason enough to shut down the app in the U.S., even if Chinese espionage wasn’t a lingering threat. And yet, the threat of Chinese spying (among other misdeeds) was in fact a great concern to Beckerman — so much so that in 2019, he wrote an entire op-ed about it in The Hill. Here are some excerpts:

"The U.S. is in a race against China to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology, and it’s a race we can’t afford to lose. . . ."