In what was the third major attempt on President Donald Trump’s life in an era of escalating political violence, this year’s White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner was abruptly cut short when multiple shots were fired, and a man was apprehended for trying to breach security.

The 31-year-old suspect, Cole Allen, could face up to life in prison.

Joining us today is Sean Spicer, who previously served as White House press secretary and White House communications director during the first Trump administration. Now, he’s the host of the Sean Spicer Show and author of the newly released book, “Trump 2.0: The Revolution That Will Permanently Transform America.”

Spicer is known for being a vocal critic of the WHCA for over a decade and has long refused invitations to attend its events. At the time of the shooting incident, he was on his way to the Renwick Museum Gallery to attend Substack’s annual alternative to the WHCA dinner called “The New Media.”

In this episode, we get his reaction to what happened, his new book “Trump 2.0,” and why he argues the second Trump administration will be far more consequential for America than the first.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

A recent landmark Jamestown Foundation report maps Chinese United Front operations, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) effort to co-opt and weaponize civil society against the CCP’s enemies.

The report, titled “Harnessing the People” and authored by researcher Cheryl Yu, identifies more than 2,000 such organizations operating in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. More than 1,000 are operating in the United States.

They span a wide range, including student, business, professional, cultural, and “friendship” groups as well as media outlets.

In this episode, I sit down with Peter Mattis, president of The Jamestown Foundation. Few understand this complex web of Chinese influence and espionage operations as well as he does.

His storied career includes roles such as senior fellow with the U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP, staff director of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and counterintelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The United Front has two distinct areas of operation: inside China and outside China. Basically, every Party committee in China has a United Front department, Mattis said. But, he said, “the big part of the work that really matters to us happens outside. ... This is a system that involves hundreds of thousands of people.”

“Mao Zedong described United Front work as a tool to storm and shatter the enemy’s position,” Mattis said.

One key task of United Front operations overseas is to find people, in particular scientists and engineers, who “are susceptible to recruitment,” Mattis said.

Many seemingly innocuous civic groups in Western countries—for example, the China Overseas Friendship Association—are used to observe, identify, and then target people who could be useful for technology transfer or even intelligence purposes.

How are targeted people approached? Typically, it’s through one of the estimated 600 talent programs that Beijing has created for this objective, Mattis said.

Programs include the Young Thousand Talents Program, which targets early-career STEM researchers, and the Hundred Talents Program, which targets scientists under 45.

Out of the four Western countries explored in the report, Canada has by far the largest number of United Front organizations per capita, five times as many as the United States.

Why, I asked Mattis, is Canada so important to China?

“It is a soft underbelly to the United States [and] to the rest of NATO,” he replied.

In Canada, he told me, there has been far less pushback against United Front organizations than in the United States.

“These groups have never really had to hide themselves. They never really had to be careful, and therefore, they could just sort of move and operate,” he said.

There are even high-level Canadian officials, senators or MPs, “that you see embedded essentially in a network of these United Front organizations,” Mattis said.

In this episode, Mattis breaks down the playbook of Chinese United Front operations. Here’s how they co-opt overseas Chinese communities, monitor and pressure dissidents, and manipulate electoral outcomes.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Subpoenaed documents released by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) reveal that American public health officials were well aware of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals for myocarditis and ischemic stroke in people over 65—well before they alerted the American public.

Last year, as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking six categories of COVID-related data, including vaccine safety surveillance data and myocarditis records.

From the subpoenaed data—enormous dumps of what has ultimately become about 11 million pages—Johnson’s team found that the CDC was well aware of the myocarditis risk even in early 2021. Yet they downplayed it instead of alerting the public, Johnson said.

Johnson’s team also found that the White House modified wording about a safety signal for ischemic stroke with the bivalent booster for people over 65, changing “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated,” according to records.

In our wide-ranging interview, we dive into what Johnson and his team discovered after sifting through millions of documents. What did America’s public health agencies really know about the COVID-19 vaccines back in 2021 and 2022? What was hidden from the American public? And what has compelled Johnson to make this issue his number one priority?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.