Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced on Tuesday that her state is being sued by the municipal government of Wuhan, China – ground zero for the devastating coronavirus pandemic – in retaliation for Missouri’s 2020 pandemic lawsuit against China.
“I find it extremely telling that the Chinese blame our great state for ‘belittling the social evaluation’ of The Wuhan Institute of Virology. This lawsuit is a stalling tactic and tells me that we have been on the right side of this issue all along,” Hanaway said on Tuesday.
“We stand undeterred in our mission to collect on our $24 billion judgment that was lawfully handed down in federal court,” she said.
Missouri filed suit against China in 2020 for “causing and exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic,” and making it more difficult for other countries to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus by “thwarting the production, purchasing, import, and export of medical equipment.”
The suit noted that China was a major producer of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), but suddenly began shutting down exports, hoarding its products, and even buying up PPE stockpiles from other countries – even as Chinese officials were deceiving the world about the threat posed by the Wuhan coronavirus.
“They basically went around and vacuumed up virtually all of the PPE around the world, including a lot from this country, which was, for humanitarian reasons, sharing our PPE with them – and what that did was leave people in New York, Milan, and everywhere in between defenseless when it came time to have that PPE,” White House economic adviser Peter Navarro explained in April 2020.
Missouri won a historic $24 billion judgment against the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, several ministries in Beijing, the municipal government of Wuhan, and the government of Hubei, the province where Wuhan is located. It was the largest judgment ever handed down in Missouri, and one of the largest ever issued by an American court against a foreign nation.
Of course, collecting $24 billion from a hostile foreign power is a tall order and Missouri was obliged to wait for a “reasonable period of time” before taking measures to collect the judgement. Hanaway began that process under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FISA) in early December.
China did not wait long before filing a $50 billion countersuit in the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court, accusing the State of Missouri and two of its former top legal officials, Eric Schmitt and Andrew Bailey, of “politicizing” the pandemic by using COVID-19 to “stigmatize” Wuhan and “slander” China. The suit was initially filed in Wuhan in April.
China also published a paper dismissing Missouri’s lawsuit as a “politically motivated farce,” which Beijing “does not recognize or accept,” and denounced Missouri’s action as a threat to the “sovereignty, security, and development interests of China.”
Hanaway fired back on Tuesday by slamming China’s retaliatory suit as a “stalling tactic” and promising she “fully intends to collect” on the $24 billion judgment against China.
“China leaked the virus, hoarded PPE resources, never showed up to court, and then decided to sue us in Wuhan,” she marveled in a post on social media platform X.
The Missouri Attorney General’s office said on Tuesday that Hanaway will “return to federal district court to obtain certification that all requirements have been met,” and then “begin seizing Chinese-owned assets, including real property, financial interests, and other holdings tied to the defendants.”
In the time since Missouri argued its case against China, former attorney general Schmitt became a U.S. senator, while Bailey is now co-deputy director of the FBI.
“I’ve been banned from Communist China, and now I am being sued and targeted by Communist China in a $50 Billion lawfare campaign, and I’ll wear it like a badge of honor,” Sen. Schmitt said when China’s legal action was announced.
“China’s sinister malfeasance during the COVID-19 pandemic led to over a million Americans losing their lives [and] economic turmoil that rocked our country for years,” he said. “Instead of trying to defend its indefensible behavior, Communist China responded with frivolous lawfare, attempting to absolve themselves of all wrongdoing in the early days of the pandemic.”
“This novel lawsuit is factually baseless, legally meritless, and any fake judgment a Chinese court issues in this lawsuit we will easily beat back and keep from being enforced against the people of Missouri or me,” he pledged.
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