President-elect Joe Biden’s inaugural committee announced that it will be returning a $500 donation from former Democrat California Sen. Barbara Boxer after it was revealed that she worked as a lobbyist for a Chinese company with alleged ties to the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims in East Turkistan.
The controversy resulted in Boxer deregistering as a foreign agent on Tuesday.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the development:
Initially, Boxer said in federal documents she signed last week that she would be “providing strategic consulting services” to the U.S. subsidiary of Hikvision, a Chinese firm that the Trump administration placed on a trade blacklist last year after the Defense Department said the company was controlled by the Chinese military.
Hikvision is a large manufacturer of video surveillance equipment that human rights advocates say is being used to subjugate Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic groups at forced
