Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said on Tuesday he would collect “every penny” of the $24.5 billion awarded in a lawsuit against China, including by seizing Chinese-owned assets in the United States.
Limbaugh rendered the decision by default after officials from the Chinese communist regime did not appear to plead their side of the case, a common outcome in cases dealing with foreign entities.
Bailey said the ruling was “a landmark victory” in the effort to hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and several of its government agencies and institutions accountable for exacerbating the pandemic with their actions.
Bailey vowed to enforce the $24.5 billion judgment and that if needed, Missouri will work with the Trump administration to identify and seize Chinese-owned assets.
“We intend to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets, including Missouri farmland,” he stated.
Bailey said in a separate statement to news outlets that the assets subject to seizure could be located anywhere in the United States, not just in Missouri.
The lawsuit, filed by the state of Missouri in 2020, accused the CCP of nationalizing American factories in China producing PPE and limiting their exports, which contributed to supply shortages in the United States.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over its actions during the pandemic, and that “China has the right to take reciprocal countermeasures in accordance with international law to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.” The ministry did not specify what countermeasures it plans to pursue.
Duncan Levin, a former federal and state prosecutor in New York City, said he is skeptical that Bailey has the legal authority to seize assets beyond Missouri or that the CCP or other defendants named in the case own any assets in the state that could be seized.
“Good luck with that,” Levin said. “This is a lot of sort of tough talk that will highly likely fall apart in the details once they get into a courtroom.”
Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University, said it would be difficult for Missouri to independently enforce the judgment against China because “that can really complicate relationships between the countries.”
Nolette said that the federal government may need to take action on behalf of a state in such cases.
In the case, Missouri supplied evidence that the CCP began quarantining doctors and their families in Wuhan in late 2019, despite the regime maintaining that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmissibility until the end of January 2020.
With this knowledge of the virus, the judgment found, the CCP began stockpiling global supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical gear, depleting supplies in Australia, Canada, and the United States before those nations grasped the severity of the outbreak in China.
After examining the evidence, Missouri determined that the state had lost more than $8 billion related to PPE alone because of both inflated prices and tax revenue losses.
