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WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, excerpts and a full video are below.

On national security concerns:

“I’m worried about this because China has proven they’re both capable and more than willing to steal intellectual property, intercept data, and they’re very good at it. Grand Forks isn’t only a major intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance base, it’s a reconnaissance wing that flies Global Hawks We recently cut the ribbon for a new satellite ground station for low earth orbit satellites that will soon provide communications in the skies. The future of Grand Forks Air Force Base is… the next generation of ISR flying vehicles – unmanned aerial systems. So it’s a very important base.

“On the agricultural side, we see China buying more and more from the US food supply chain. Today we produce far more food than we consume and we are happy to sell it to hungry people all over the world. We are very good at that. But when the supply chain becomes more captive, not only to foreign ownership, but also to foreign adversaries like China who have demonstrated not to be trusted with supply chains. We just went through a pandemic that exposed a lot of that. I’m just not very comfortable with the Chinese Communist Party controlling so much of our supply chains. The food supply, the energy supply, the pharmaceutical supply, that’s all part of national security.

On the need for a CFIUS review of the Fufeng farmland purchase:

“A lot of this came to light when Senators Rubio, Hoeven and I requested a review by CFIUS – CFIUS being the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. We sent a letter to the chair of the committee, which is of course Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury. It is made up of approximately 14 Cabinet and White House officials in intelligence, law enforcement and security agencies. They will identify major concerns, minor concerns , or maybe there is no concern… I am quite confident that there will be a lot of concerns raised by intelligence, defense and security forces and these will be heard at the local level.

On the City of Grand Forks’ guardrails and recoveries:

“The community of Grand Forks has done a great job installing guardrails and salvages. Communities need to protect themselves against the kind of predatory investment that China has proven to be very good at. [Grand Forks]are very well protected in their assets. So I’m confident that everything will turn out fine and that in the end we will have a unified community that will support the final decision.

On China as a nefarious partner:

“If China does not benefit from an investment in North Dakota, why would it make an investment in North Dakota? That would be my first question. Obviously, China benefits from this, and when you see what it does with its money in terms of economic dominance, in terms of modernizing its own army. As you know, they are great at technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and with that they have developed their own hypersonic missile systems and other high tech defenses. China is taking advantage of this.

“China today has turned out to be a very nefarious China. Rather than inviting them into our backyard, we should have more of a strategic decoupling of our relationship with China. [We ought to] working more closely with our allies, Western nations and other Asian nations that share our values ​​rather than having a partner so close to us that we cannot trust.

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