Kamala's Running Mate Search Hits Another Snag

Damaging stories have plagued two candidates at the top of Kamala Harris's running mate search list. On Sunday, we reported that a Democrat running for statewide office in Pennsylvania accused Gov. Josh Shapiro, one of the frontrunners, of covering up sexual harassment in his office. 

Harris wasn't likely to choose Shapiro anyway. Despite hailing from Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Harris, his Jewish heritage and pro-Israel positions likely would hurt the ticket among the antisemitic and anti-Zionist wing of the party.

But now the dirt is coming out about another top contender, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). It turns out that he "co-founded a company that specializes in spy balloons, which was funded, in part, by a venture capitalist in China with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party," according to a report from Fox News.

The report explains how Kelly co-founded World View in Tucson, Ariz., in 2012. Initially focused on space tourism using stratospheric balloons, the company's vision has since evolved with technological advancements.

"As we matured our technology, we recognized an opportunity for immediate use cases for our technology through remote sensing services to defense, scientific and commercial customers," a spokesperson for World View told Fox News Digital. "Today, our primary business remains providing remote sensing services to the U.S. Department of Defense and her allies by way of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as servicing scientific organizations like NASA, NOAA and others to better understand Earth from the unique atmospheric layer of the stratosphere."

Axios reported that shortly after World View was started, it received venture capital from Tencent in 2013, then again in 2016.

Tencent is one of China's largest corporations, and it was founded in 1998 by "Pony" Ma Huateng, Zhang Zhidong, Xu Chenye, Chen Yidan and Zeng Liqing. Last year, "Pony" Ma Huateng was listed by Forbes as the fourth-richest man in China with a net worth of $32.1 billion. Ma is also the CEO of Tencent.

Last year, the Biden-Harris administration allowed a Chinese spy balloon to surveil U.S. military installations and likely wouldn't have told the public about it, but civilians discovered the spy balloon, prompting widespread media coverage. The balloon could acquire and transmit intelligence to Beijing in real time. It wasn't until after it had completely surveilled U.S. military installations that the Air Force finally shot it down. 

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Tencent collected a trove of data over the years from its mobile app WeChat, the predominant social-media platform in China. The data was collected through its processing of the chat conversations and financial transactions of its over one billion monthly active users, most of them in China. That has made the company’s platform WeChat a powerful surveillance tool for the Chinese government, which reportedly regulates Tencent and regularly has it suppress dissenting views. 

With Tencent’s ties to the Chinese government, World View told Fox News Digital on Saturday that Tencent has "zero access, zero input and zero control" over the company.

"The current leadership believed it was a mistake for the company to accept Chinese investment when it did," a company spokesperson said. "When new leadership arrived in 2019 and learned of that investment, they swiftly moved to ensure World View was protected from any and all involvement from representatives of Chinese investors."

However, Kelly's company's initial ties with a Chinese investor might spark concerns as the Harris campaign vets him. Welcome to the national spotlight, Sen. Kelly.