Sen. Cramer Discusses CFIUS Request for Fufeng Farmland Purchase, National Security Concerns on Newsmax

Statement

U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined The Record with Greta Van Susteren on Newsmax to discuss the Fufeng group's purchase of farmland near the Grand Forks Air Force Base. Senator Cramer also highlighted his request to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) review the purchase and expressed national security concerns about this investment. Excerpts and full video are below.

On National Security Concerns:

"This is exactly why the [CFIUS] request went not only the Janet Yellen, the Secretary of Treasury, which oversees CFIUS, but a key member of the Committee, [Defense]Secretary Austin… The reason it's important to Grand Forks, or at least important to those of us who care about national security, is because this particular investment, the Fufeng investment, is 370 acres that will become a corn milling plant within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base. [Grand Forks] is a very important [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] (ISR) base that flies the Global Hawks today. We'll be flying a new mission in the future and we just cut ribbon a couple of weeks ago on a Space Development Agency ground control system for a tranche of satellites. So needless to say, there's a lot of sensitive data that goes up and down from Grand Forks and could be subjected to easily be interfered with or stolen.

On the CFIUS Review Request:

"[CFIUS] does have teeth if it should go all the way to the President. So the first review process is actually just that -- a review. They have to do within 45 days and then you can actually expedite that even. Once a review is done and the review reveals certain things, certain threats, perhaps, or risk assessment of some sort, it can then go to another 45 day investigation. If that investigation demonstrates that the mitigation of risks will either be difficult, costly, impossible, the President can then review it for his own 15 days, and then the President can determine whether or not the investment should be allowed to go forward. In this case in Grand Forks, I think the first review is all that will be necessary quite honestly, because local officials could take it from there."

"It's foreign investments that we're concerned about, that [CFIUS] is concerned about. In the Fufeng case, the local community leadership and the state have done a really good job of putting in guardrails, including clawbacks. So let's say for example, the investment's made -- it has been made, the land has been purchased. But if anything sketchy should show up, the state and the community have reserved the right to end the deal and they would then of course, take ownership of the property. So to their credit, they've done a really good job of protecting the investment to make sure it doesn't leave the country or get compromised."

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