Here we go again.
In 2022, Cindy Axne ran an ad hammering Zach Nunn for taking a donation from Syngenta, a company with Chinese ownership. It backfired spectacularly when it came out Axne herself had toured Syngenta’s facilities and publicly thanked the company for “powering Iowa agriculture.” Four years later, Iowa Democrats tried the identical play against Randy Feenstra. Now Sarah Trone Garriott is running the same attack against Nunn, in a new ad accusing him of taking “thousands of dollars from Chinese companies.”
Someone should tell whoever keeps pulling this file out of the drawer that it never works, because it never holds up. An Iowa Field Report investigation found it doesn’t hold up this time either. This time, she’s the one exposed.
Trone Garriott wants voters to be alarmed that Nunn took a donation connected to Syngenta, the agricultural company Chinese state-owned ChemChina bought in 2017. Fair enough, that’s a real fact, worth scrutiny. But Trone Garriott left out the part where the man who personally engineered that $43 billion sale to Beijing, the lawyer who spent months making sure China’s government got its hands on Syngenta, is one of her own campaign’s donors.
His name is Alan Klein. And he’s not a bit player.
According to his own firm biography, Klein represented “ChemChina in its $43 billion acquisition of Syngenta,” the largest foreign acquisition by a Chinese company in history. He didn’t just paper the deal, he ran ChemChina’s team through CFIUS clearance, the exact national security review process that exists to catch deals like this one. The Street reported he personally helped fend off an American rival, a St. Louis-based company, that wanted to buy Syngenta instead. For his trouble, the National Law Journal named him a 2017 “M&A Trailblazer.”
And Syngenta wasn’t Klein’s first rodeo with Chinese state money. Nearly a decade earlier, Klein represented Chinalco, the Chinese government-controlled aluminum giant, as it poured $19.5 billion into the Australian mining company Rio Tinto, at the time the largest foreign investment ever made by a Chinese entity. Klein got that one through CFIUS clearance too.
So when Beijing’s state-owned companies need an American lawyer to help them buy their way into strategic Western assets, Alan Klein is apparently the man they call. And Alan Klein is one of the people bankrolling Sarah Trone Garriott’s campaign for Congress, giving her $500 on February 18 and another $2,500 on February 28, for a combined $3,000.
He’s not alone. Jonathan and Jennifer Soros have given Trone Garriott $14,000 across this cycle, split evenly between the primary and general elections. Jonathan Soros served as president of the Soros fund when it invested $25 million in Hainan Airlines, China’s fourth-largest carrier, back in 2005.
Meanwhile, Zach Nunn’s actual record on China looks like this: nearly two decades in the Air Force, including reconnaissance missions off the coasts of Russia and China, more than 700 combat hours logged, and he currently serves as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve. In Congress, he’s introduced legislation to protect American farmland from Chinese buyers, pushed back on China’s trade practices, and helped pass a bill cracking down on China’s ability to secretly run businesses on American soil.
Sarah Trone Garriott wants to make this race about who’s compromised by China. That’s a conversation Iowa voters should absolutely have. She should just know it’s not the conversation she thinks she’s starting.
