Newsom’s Deep Financial Ties to Pentagon-Blacklisted Chinese Military Company

California Governor Gavin Newsom received $50,000 in campaign contributions from a top executive at a Chinese electric vehicle company (BYD) that Newsom fawned over during his 2023 visit to China. BYD is now on a Pentagon blacklist due to its ties to the Chinese military, the Washington Free Beacon reports.

If BYD rings a bell for California Globe readers, it should. In 2020, we reported that Gov. Gavin Newsom spent over $1 billion in taxpayer funds to buy masks from the Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD at the start of the COVID pandemic.

An electric car company suddenly pivots to making masks — and Newsom chooses them over American suppliers?

Then he went back for more. Newsom signed a second deal worth another $315 million. 

The Globe broke the story. RedState amplified it. Even some mainstream outlets in California covered it. 

A handful of unhappy Democrat lawmakers in the Legislature demanded an audit of the unauthorized purchases, but they fell silent after a single demand letter to the governor.

And then — POOF — the media lost interest. At least the mainstream media did.

In 2023, the California Globe covered Newsom’s trip to China and reminded readers exactly who BYD was, and how the governor’s corrupt $1.4 billion mask deal went down.

While the mainstream media chased the next shiny object, the Globe kept digging. What we uncovered was a $1.4 billion contract that smelled like well-connected insider dealing at the highest levels of the governor’s office.

Here’s what we found:

BYD — “Build Your Dreams” — is a Chinese electric vehicle and battery giant headquartered in Shenzhen. The company operates a California subsidiary in Lancaster that employs roughly 1,000 people.

Our reporting exposed a web of influential players tied to the unusual mask contract, with connections reaching directly into Governor Newsom’s inner circle.

The prominent lobbyist representing BYD is Mark Weideman of The Weideman Group. Newsom’s campaign received $40,000 in contributions from BYD’s automotive division.

Weideman also lobbies for Bloom Energy, a San Jose fuel-cell manufacturer that retooled its operations to refurbish ventilators during the pandemic. He additionally represents NextGen America, owned by Tom Steyer — the same Tom Steyer who chaired Newsom’s economic recovery committee after his own failed presidential bid.

When the Globe contacted Weideman for comment, neither a phone call to his office on May 19, 2020, at 1:07 p.m., nor a follow-up email sent on May 25 received any response.

Adding another layer of insider access: Weideman’s wife, Jennifer Wada, runs her own government relations firm, Wada Government Relations Group. Few Sacramento insiders realize the two are married. Wada previously partnered in the law firm Wada Williams Law Group with Anthony Williams — the same Anthony Williams who now serves as Gov. Newsom’s Legislative Affairs Secretary and was once described in news reports as the governor’s “chief lobbyist.”

Newsom’s 2023 trip to China raised more questions than answers. The governor never clearly explained its purpose beyond setting up yet another round of sweetheart deals with Beijing.

The most memorable (and telling) moment came when Newsom was filmed behind the wheel of a sleek new BYD electric vehicle. A California Fox News anchor traveling with him apparently never connected the dots, we reported.

.@GavinNewsom gets behind the wheel of @BYDCompany’s newest vehicle & checks out the self turning mode.

It’s a hybrid, that drives itself and can also float on water.

Price starts at $160,000. Available now in China. They hope to bring them to America soon. @FOXLA pic.twitter.com/aOKXzaGLcz

— Elex Michaelson (@Elex_Michaelson) October 24, 2023

The itinerary included stops in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Newsom billed the visit as a “climate-focused tour,” complete with a wind farm and Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory. Critics saw something else entirely: a governor willfully ignoring China’s industrial espionage, human rights abuses, and military ambitions.

As the Washington Free Beacon reported:

“Ke Li — a Chinese national who serves as BYD’s executive vice president and is reportedly married to the company’s billionaire founder and CEO, Wang Chuanfu, a Chinese Communist Party member and close ally of Xi Jinping — donated $20,000 to Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign and another $30,000 to his 2022 reelection bid.”

That’s more money than Li has given to all other California candidates combined.

Newsom’s cozy relationship with BYD has only deepened. He has showered the company with state contracts and, during his 2023 visit to its Shenzhen headquarters, test-drove a BYD model that floats on water. “Who needs a car when you can have a car and a boat?” Newsom quipped.

Three years later, that relationship is apparently on a crash course. This week, the Pentagon formally classified BYD as a Chinese military company, adding it to a list of entities that help Beijing fuse private industry with its military buildup.

Newsom’s ties to China go back decades to his time as mayor of San Francisco. Just this week, Peter W. Wood at American Greatness published a powerful new piece titled “How China Captured California,” detailing exactly how deep that entanglement has become:

In 2005, the mayor of San Francisco paid a visit to Shanghai, where he worked out some agreements that furthered city-to-city cooperation. Mayor Gavin Newsom was at the beginning of a career that married environmental alarmism to close cooperation with the Chinese state. The memorandum he signed with Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng brought Chinese police officers, attorneys, and judges to the Fog City. Newsom in turn brought bottles of PlumpJack from his Napa Valley winery.

Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, continues:

My organization, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), has spent a year attempting to trace the connections, the political favors, and the interweaving of Chinese state interests with California’s political establishment. We don’t have subpoena power or deep connections to the regime. We are, instead, specialists in higher education, so we naturally learned more about that side of the picture than anything else. But the political side was unavoidable.

My assessment: California’s energy policy is made in China, and California is in many respects a vassal of China. Best of all, from China’s perspective, few Californians realize it. They live in a dream world where high-price energy is just the cost they pay for a really clean environment. NAS’s report, Behind the Climate Curtain: China’s Hidden Role in California’s Energy Mandates and University Partnerships, presents our evidence to back these audacious claims. I can’t say we have the kind of proof that will lead to future perp-walks of politicians by the FBI. But we have wind farms, solar plantations, and tankers full of the kinds of details that investigators might want to examine.

Gavin Newsom’s relationship with BYD isn’t a series of unfortunate coincidences. It is a damning pattern of favoritism that has funneled billions in California taxpayer dollars to a Chinese company now officially designated by the Pentagon as a military asset of the Chinese Communist Party. From no-bid mask contracts worth $1.4 billion to campaign donations routed through a BYD executive married to the firm’s CCP-connected founder, Newsom has repeatedly chosen Beijing over American interests and California taxpayers. 

While he grins behind the wheel of floating BYD vehicles in Shenzhen, the Golden State grows more economically dependent and strategically compromised. As Peter W. Wood exposed this week in American Greatness, California hasn’t merely been influenced by China, it has been captured. And no one has held the door open wider, or longer, than Gavin Newsom.

Executive Editor Megan Barth contributed to this report.