(LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump said he will bring up the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, saying that he wants him to be released.
“Jimmy Lai, he caused lots of turmoil in China. He tried to do the right thing. He wasn’t successful, went to jail, and people would like him out,” Trump told reporters on Monday, according to PBS News. “And I’d like to see him get out too.”
“I’ll bring him up again. I have brought him up,” the president added.
Trump then compared Lai to James Comey, suggesting that will be unlikely for China to release Lai, a prominent adversary of the communist regime.
“Jimmy Lai, you know, he caused a lot of bedlam,” he said. “It’s like saying to me, ‘if Comey ever went to jail, would you let him out?’ That might be a hard one for me. ‘Cause he’s a dirty cop.”
The comparison is a strange one. Former FBI Director Comey was considered a top enemy of Trump and was indicted for a photo he posted on social media that was widely seen as a call for the murder of President Donald Trump. He was also indicted for allegedly lying under oath about “Russiagate.” Trump fired Comey in 2017 for his handling of the Russiagate hoax.
Jimmy Lai has been punished essentially for his opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He was charged in 2020 with “collusion with foreign forces” in violation of the draconian National Security Law (NSL) that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in order to suppress dissent against the CCP. Lai’s tabloid Apple Daily had published criticism of the CCP that led to retaliation by communist authorities.
However, Trump did not condemn Lai for his dissent against the CCP but appeared rather to defend him.
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Critics have denounced the recent 20-year sentencing of Lai, which is the harshest yet imposed under the NSL, as especially cruel given that 78-year-old Lai is likely to die in prison due to his age and health conditions.
His son Sebastian told the BBC that the prison sentence was “basically a death sentence” and that his father was being punished for defending “the freedoms of Hong Kong.”
Lai escaped to Hong Kong from China as a child and became a self-made businessman on the island, founding in 1995 the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily, which published criticism of the CCP. The paper became one of the leading newspapers in Hong Kong but closed its doors in June 2021 when the offices were raided by CCP security personnel and Lai was arrested.
His arrest and subsequent jail sentence caused outrage in the international sphere, with the U.S. State Department issuing an October 2022 statement in which it deplored the Chinese National Security Law’s “systematic dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy” and called for a restoration of “respect for press freedom in Hong Kong, where a once-vibrant independent media environment has all but disappeared.”