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Senior Biden administration officials faced tough questioning from lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week over false spying allegations and the federal government’s stalled negotiations with Pacific Islander nations.
- At a House Judiciary hearing Thursday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) pressed Attorney General Merrick Garland on whether the Justice Department would implement implicit bias training following the failed prosecution of Anming Hu and a troubling review of the agency’s activity by the Chinese American nonprofit Committee of 100.
- Garland, who said he is “greatly attuned” to anti-Asian racism, replied that the DOJ will “make a determination” of which cases to pursue and which ones to not based on “the facts justifying them.” He did not further elaborate.
- In July, Lieu urged Garland to investigate the department’s alleged racial profiling of Asians under the Trump-era “China Initiative,” a controversial program launched in 2018 to target economic espionage.
- Separately, members of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations “scolded” administration officials for not making more progress on negotiations over a critical security pact with the Marshall Islands, the Los Angeles Times’ Susanne Rust reports.
- Context: The U.S.’s refusal to manage the Runit Dome—a byproduct of American nuclear weapons tests that now holds over 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive waste (or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools)—threatens to derail talks over renewal of the Compact of Free Association (COFA), which expires in 2023.
- At Thursday’s hearing, representatives from the U.S. Energy and Interior Departments publicly disagreed on whether the U.S. has a responsibility to monitor and clean up the site.
- Catch up: Bipartisan concern has been mounting over the Biden administration’s stalled negotiations with Micronesian countries, The Yappie’s Javan Santos writes. Federal lawmakers have sent letters to the president and senior officials demanding an envoy to manage the talks.
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