Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) may have aided the Chinese Communist state in developing high-altitude spy balloons. In 2012, the Democrat Senator co-founded the high-altitude balloon firm World View and sought investment from the Chinese-based technology conglomerate Tencent, which owns the spyware app WeChat. Kelly is currently under consideration to be KamalaHarris‘s running mate in the 2024 presidential election.
Tencent’s investment in Kelly‘s balloon company was facilitated by the future Arizona Senator in 2014 and again in 2016. New reports indicate that claims made by World View that the company had been cleared by the U.S. Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) are false—and the Kelly-founded balloon company’s business relations with Tencent and the Chinese defense industry did, in fact, raise national security concerns.
According to a report by Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics, the DCSA explicitly suspended the clearance approval process for Kelly’s company.