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Three legislators from Connecticut, including Senator Pro Tempore Martin Looney (D), Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D) and Speaker Of the House Matt Ritter (D), have been elected to the 2024 Board of Directors of the State Legislative Leaders Foundation (SLLF), a Chinese Communist Party-linked organization.
Looney, currently in his fifteenth State Senate term, having been elected to the State Senate in 1992 to represent New Haven and Hamden, following six terms as a State Representative, was first elected to the position of Vice Chair of the SLLF Board of Directors on February 4th, 2016.
He now serves as Chair of the Board as of 2024.
At least 15 other elected state officials from Connecticut have attended SLLF's Emerging Leaders Program.
The program, which is allegedly nonpartisan, offers mentoring to first- and second-term legislators who have been identified by their peers as future leaders, according to SLLF, which has in the past received funding from the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates, the Ford Foundation, and the William T Grant Foundation.
What's really raising eyebrows, though, is the fact that the State Legislative Leaders Foundation got a mention in the Marco Polo Report for an email exchange from April 28, 2015.
Marco Polo (MP), which was founded in July 2021, and spent its first 18 months writing a 644-page dossier on the Hunter Biden Laptop, uncovered an email from the laptop between Steve Lakis, the founder of SLLF, and Jimmy Bulger, the nephew of Whitey Bulger.
"The rosy exterior of the SLLF belies its deep connections to the CCP and its partnership with the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC)-- the "public face" of the CCP's United Front Work Department-- which Hunter forged. Whitey Bulger's nephew arranged for Hunter to 'sit down with [Lakis] and give him some advice," said the MP report.
Lakis had apparently sought Hunter's advice on setting up an SLLF office in China.
The email described the framework established between the U.S. and Chinese government called the US-China Governors Forum which was established by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the CPAFFC "to promote peer-to-peer exchanges between U.S. state governors and Chinese provincial party secretaries and governors on topics of mutual interest such as trade, investment, energy and the environment."
SLLF indicated it wanted to set up a similar arrangement that focused on the exchange between the state-level legislative branches of each country as opposed to the executive branch.
“Whatever you need on this just let me know and I’ll make it work,” Hunter said to Bulger.
"The Biden group's primary goal was to have Obama reference the collaboration between the State Legislative Leaders [Forum] and the Chinese group in his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping," concluded the MP report, a goal which was realized.
According to Chuck Ross at the Washington Free Beacon:
It is not clear why the partnership—or the Obama administration’s blessing of it—would have helped Hunter Biden’s business prospects. What is clear is that he and his colleagues believed it would: Biden associate James Bulger wrote in a July 17, 2015, email that the Beijing office would be "a great business driver" for a joint venture they sought with Harvest Fund Management, a Chinese investment firm led by Henry Zhao, a businessman and reported member of the Chinese Communist Party.
The lobbying campaign proved wildly successful on all fronts. After a September 2015 meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, President Barack Obama endorsed the partnership between State Legislative Leaders Foundation and the Chinese group. Months later, Hunter Biden’s company finalized its multimillion-dollar deal with Harvest Management.
After learning that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, one of the most prominent and powerful Republicans in Wisconsin, also served on the Board of SLLF as a Vice Chair, a petition was circulated to trigger a recall election but it failed to gather enough signatures, according to the Wisconsin State Elections Commission.
