*By Justin Chermol*
The newly appointed vice chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), said he is "absolutely" concerned that Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei poses a threat to national security in an interview on Cheddar Tuesday.
"I do have that concern," Castro told Cheddar's J.D. Durkin. He noted that he helped push a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act last year to prevent government grants or loans being used to pay for Huawei services.
The Department of Justice unsealed two separate indictments on Monday against the company and its CFO Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested in December. The cases claim the company and its leaders attempted to steal trade secrets from rival T-Mobile, promised bonuses to employees in exchange for intel on competitors, and sought to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.
"With China, our overarching strategy has to be to respect them when they compete, but also to stop them when they cheat," he said.
Castro is particularly disturbed by prospect of Huawei lifting T-Mobile's technology for its own gain.
"What you see with China is the outright theft of trade secrets and technology and then taking that technology, in this case from T-Mobile, and using it for the benefit of Chinese companies without ever doing any of the innovation or the hard work ー or spending the money in terms of research or development to understand it themselves," he said.
The indictments may coincide with trade talks between the U.S. and Chinese officials, but Castro said that the meetings scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday are unrelated to the charges leveled against Huawei.
"We should be able to separate out some sort of cheating or malfeasance from what we do in terms of talking about trade," he said.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/rep-joaquin-castro-talks-mueller-probe-huawei-charges-and-more).
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Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson pushed back against President Trump's attacks on mail-in voting, which have continued for days, leading Twitter to put up its first fact checks on the president's account.
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