Begun in 2018, the Justice Department’s “China Initiative,” a program to counter Chinese economic and military espionage, has been shuttered under criticism that it led to racial profiling of US residents and pulled resources into a myopic national security program, the Washington Post reports.
In announcing the cancelation Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen, head of the department’s national security division, said the program targeting China specifically will be replaced by a broader-spectrum national security program that will look at threats from various fronts.
“By picking one country, what the China Initiative did is it created in some ways a bit of a myopic approach, which I don’t think really reflects the nature of the threat landscape,” Olsen said.