Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) said Thursday that she now opposes an electric vehicle battery plant project tied to the Chinese Communist Party after avoiding taking a position on it for years and signing a hush agreement to participate in negotiations about it.
"To me, until there's a national security vetting, I don't love the idea of moving forward on any project or any sale of farmland" to Chinese entities, Slotkin told reporters, according to Politico. She added that "the national security implications of Chinese-affiliated companies" developing projects in the United States must be considered.
Slotkin's statement was a reference to the EV battery plant being developed by a subsidiary of the China-based company Gotion High-Tech across hundreds of acres in Green Charter Township, Mich. Gotion, which maintains significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party, announced the project in October 2022 alongside state Democrats such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who promised hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded subsidies for the development.
Slotkin's abrupt repositioning on the issue comes after her Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers, hammered her over the EV project. Slotkin, a congresswoman and former CIA agent, refused to directly weigh in on whether she supports the CCP-tied project until Thursday. Her statement expressing concern about Gotion's project is a marked departure from the rhetoric she has used to address the project thus far. Before Thursday, she had only broadly highlighted her commitment to American manufacturing and national security issues.
In response to attacks on the issue, Slotkin pointed to her work "to bring microchip manufacturing back to the United States."
"In Congress, my opponent supported trade deal after trade deal—including NAFTA—that helped ship jobs to places like China," she added.
She has also issued statements about the importance of the United States clawing back the global EV supply chain from Chinese industry, all while avoiding any mention of Gotion.
"There’s no denying that EVs will be a big part of the next generation of vehicles, and if you look at Europe and Mexico, you’ll see China already trying to dominate the future of autos. It’s vital to our economic and national security that it’s built in America instead," Slotkin said in a post on July 11.
"Yesterday, I asked [Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth] about something that I’ve been watching closely: the national security threat of Chinese electric vehicles," she said months earlier on April 17. "Chinese-made EVs now have nearly 20% market share in the EU, after only being introduced in the last few years."
She also introduced a bill in June that would create a national security review for connected vehicles built by Chinese companies and released into the American market. The legislation—which she said was vital since Chinese vehicles are a "potential national security risk that we need to address now"—would notably not include the Gotion factory.
Amid her blurry stance on the Gotion project, Slotkin signed a hush agreement with Michigan state officials in January 2022 to discuss certain unnamed economic development projects in the state, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. That agreement was then amended in December 2022 to include "any potential development project identified as confidential" by state officials, a description that covers the Gotion project.
Slotkin's deputy legislative director, Austin Girelli, signed a similar agreement covering the Gotion project in September 2022, weeks before the project was announced, the documents show.
"Slotkin sold out Michigan auto workers to China, signed an NDA to conceal it, and Chinese foreign agents rewarded her with cash. Slotkin cannot hide her record of helping the CCP, and this blatant flip-flop is just further proof that she’ll say whatever the polling recommends and can’t be trusted," Chris Gustafson, a spokesman for the Rogers Senate campaign, said in a statement Friday.
In August, the Rogers campaign unleashed a seven-figure ad blitz targeting Slotkin for "sign[ing] a secret deal that helped a Chinese company," a reference to the hush agreement she signed. Last year, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released an ad campaign of its own targeting Slotkin over the agreement and labeled the Democrat "Shanghai Slotkin."
Neither Slotkin's campaign nor Gotion responded to requests for comment.
Gotion's project, meanwhile, has faced substantial opposition from locals, national security experts, and bipartisan lawmakers over Gotion's ties to the CCP. While it is still in the early stages of development and isn't expected to come online for years, critics have called for the project to be scrapped altogether.
For example, Gotion's corporate bylaws state that the company is required to "carry out Party activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China." Additionally, its subsidiary Gotion Inc. is listed as a Chinese foreign principal in recently filed Foreign Agents Registration Act disclosures reviewed by the Free Beacon.
Further, in 2021, Gotion High-Tech hosted multiple company trips to CCP revolutionary memorials in Anhui Province, China, the Daily Caller News Foundation first reported. During the trips, Gotion High-Tech employees wore Red Army outfits and pledged to "fight for communism to the end of my life."