Yesterday, I posted a Fact Sheet from the State Department titled U.S. Investors Are Funding Malign PRC Companies on Major Indices, dated this past Saturday. And now, it’s gone… if you click through on the link I provide in the post, you end up on State’s Press Releases page.
In the meantime, the Fact Sheet’s contents have spread around the Internet, either as direct quotes, like I do, or as fodder for articles:
So, Mr. Watchlist wonders: why did the Fact Sheet disappear? Did Treasury, or the SEC, object to roiling the markets by publicizing these companies, some of which have not been designated under Executive Order 13959?
Or was this actually the plan all along? Put the Fact Sheet out – on Saturday afternoon, no less – such that it spread out into cyberspace and had its intended effect on these companies, and then try to have plausible deniability by removing it from the State website?
Of course, there is always the great Internet Wayback Machine (aka Archive.org). And I just checked – it comes up empty for that page. And when you look at how often the State Department website was crawled, it was crawled every day this year… except between December 3rd and Sunday, the 6th. Wow, that seems fishy…
Categories: State Department Updates
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