Last Updated on May 28, 2025
National File originally reported that AT&T petitioned the United States government to allow it to continue working with China Telecom, a company wholly owned by the Chinese Communist government, that former Undersecretary of Commerce Corey Stewart revealed gives location data about members of the Uyghur ethnic minority and other dissidents to the Chinese government so they can arrest and send them to concentration camps.
After Stewart appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss National File’s reporting, AT&T doubled down, defending its decision to work with and lobby on behalf of a CCP-controlled company that allegedly assists in what the U.S. State Department considers a “genocide” of an ethnic minority.
First reiterating their original statement, obtained by National File, which defended the decision to work with the CCP-controlled company because it allowed them to make large profits while serving companies located in the Chinese mainland, AT&T then used bullet points to highlight their financial motivations.
“By law in China, without a relationship with a licensed Chinese communications company, AT&T (or any other non-Chinese carrier) cannot fulfill its obligation to support our US based clients operating in China,” wrote AT&T in one bullet point. “In the absence of that, such support would be provided by a Chinese state-owned enterprise instead of AT&T or any other American company,” they added in another.
Stew, there was a segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight which depicted several incorrect statements about our operations abroad. Our transparent statement on this inaccurate attack is available on https://t.co/ZNNHAubt1a
— AT&T (@ATT) February 25, 2021
AT&T has essentially taken the position that lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a CCP-controlled company and then doing business with that company allows it to make unprecedented profits while serving unnamed American companies also working in the Chinese mainland. If AT&T does not fill this void, they assert, then a Chinese state owned company would earn these profits instead.
In its original statement, AT&T noted that is has made $125 billion in profits over the last five years, while it has worked with the CCP-controlled China Telecom.
While AT&T claims this somehow refutes the reporting done by Tucker Carlson, Stewart, and originally National File, the telecom giant – which owns the left wing CNN – has failed to demonstrate why any American telecom giant should profit off a regime that the U.S. State Department has declared is currently in the process of committing genocide.
As National File exclusively reported, this story began when AT&T’s Ed Gillespie, former the RNC Chairman, called the Trump administration to prevent China Telecom from being placed on the Entity List, a blacklist of companies that are not allowed to do business in the United States or with American companies due to ties to – or in this case ownership by – bad actors.
According to Stewart, this was “Very disturbing, [because] we had a lot of indications, there was very good intelligence out there, that the Chinese government, through its state owned subsidiary of China Telecom, has been using cell phone technology, telecommunications technology, to track minority populations in China, to spy on them, and then to hand this information over to the China police state.”
“And they’re rounding up the Uyghur population,” said Stewart. “As well as Tibetans and other minorities, and placing these people in essentially modern day concentration camps.”
