ALARMING: Harris’ potential VP candidate started spy balloon company funded by Chinese investor

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From Fox News: Before becoming a senator, Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., was not only an astronaut, but he also co-founded a company that specializes in spy balloons, which was funded, in part, by a venture capitalist in China with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Kelly, who is reportedly on a short list of running mate contenders under consideration by Vice President Kamala Harris, co-founded Tucson, Arizona-based World View in 2012 with a vision to provide space tourism using stratospheric balloons.

While Kelly’s company started out with a focus on space tourism via balloons, the vision evolved with the maturing of the company’s technology.

“As we matured our technology, we recognized an opportunity for immediate use cases for our technology through remote sensing services to defense, scientific and commercial customers,” a spokesperson for World View told Fox News Digital. “Today, our primary business remains providing remote sensing services to the U.S. Department of Defense and her allies by way of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as servicing scientific organizations like NASA, NOAA and others to better understand Earth from the unique atmospheric layer of the stratosphere.”

In their report, Fox News quotes details from a February 2023 report by Axios, titled, “How an Arizona “spy balloon” company is tied to Sen. Kelly and China.”

Susan Crabtree of Real Clear Politics announced that she had first broken the story back in 2020:

Once again, I first broke the Mark Kelly starting a spy balloon company funded by China’s TenCent in 2020. Then I did another story on it 2023 when the spy balloon was traversing the U.S.

Now @FoxNews giving @Axios credit for breaking this story after my THREE stories from 2020 and 2023. BUT @Axios never got to the heart of the story and mainly bought into Kelly’s excuses for it. The Axios story also never addressed this:

👉The Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) SUSPENDED the process to grant Kelly’s company clearance for U.S. defense work. I have the emails from DCSA and I’ll attach to this thread.

I’ve included the three main stories I wrote below. Back in 2020, The spokesperson for Kelly’s balloon company lied to me that they had secured DCSA’s seal of approval. The DCSA aims to protect U.S. security assets from malign foreign influence.

Here’s the three stories I broke on in reverse chronology – the latest, in 2023, and then the two stories I first broke in 2020 on the same topic.

Did U.S. Firms Help Propel China’s Balloon Fleet? – 2/24/2023
https://realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/24/did_us_firms_help_propel_chinas_balloon_fleet_148906.html…

Kelly Helped Secure Chinese Tech Giant’s Stake in Balloon Firm – 7/9/2020
https://realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/09/kelly_helped_secure_chinese_tech_giants_stake_in_firm.html…

Kelly Silent on Firm’s Windfall from Chinese Tech Giant – 5/13/2020
https://realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/13/mark_kelly_silent_on_firms_windfall_from_chinese_tech_giant.html…

Former astronaut Sen. Mark Kelly started spy balloon company funded by China https://foxnews.com/politics/former-astronaut-sen-mark-kelly-started-spy-balloon-company-funded-china #FoxNews

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