Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin does not want his state to participate in the Ford Motor Co. request to build a battery manufacturing plant due to national security concerns associated with China. The automaker has an ongoing agreement with a Chinese company.
“We felt that the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America,” Youngkin told reporters on Jan 11., after his State of the Commonwealth speech to the General Assembly. Later, Richard Cullen, the governor’s chief legal counsel, told the Washington Post that the battery project involved “national security risk-type technology.”
In his address to the General Assembly at the beginning of a new legislative session, Youngkin said that the risk tied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was “common sense,” calling the CCP “a dictatorial political party that only has one goal: global dominance at the expense of the United States.”…