David Perdue Edits Out His Asia Experience From Senate Campaign Ad

The GOP senator from Georgia has been using China as a political football, so a picture of him in front of the Great Wall apparently wasn't very convenient.
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Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) is out with a new biographical campaign video touting his family roots and his successful business career as he fights to hold on to his seat ahead of a Jan. 5 runoff against Democrat Jon Ossoff.

The biographical information is nearly identical to a video he put out in 2014, with a key difference: The new one removes a mention of the two years he spent in Hong Kong working for Sara Lee and takes out a picture of him and his wife at the Great Wall of China.

Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) put this picture in his 2014 ad, but he removed it from a nearly identical ad for this campaign.
Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) put this picture in his 2014 ad, but he removed it from a nearly identical ad for this campaign.
David Perdue Senate campaign ad

The 2014 video has a section about how David and Bonnie “set out for the world and added two sons along the way.”

“For Sara Lee, David led their expansion into Asia, living in Hong Kong for two years,” the narrator says at 1:45 into the video.

“It sure wasn’t Georgia,” quips Bonnie.

The new video, released last week, skips right from the part about setting out to see the world and adding to their family to his experience at Reebok, omitting any mention of his time in Hong Kong. Watch the new video:

The Perdue campaign did not return a request for comment, and Ossoff’s campaign declined to comment.

Fearmongering about China has been a central theme of Perdue’s campaign, so a picture of him at the Great Wall and boasts about time spent in Asia aren’t politically convenient. Perdue has accused Ossoff of being funded by the Chinese government and endorsed by the Communist Party.

“He’ll never hold China accountable or deal with our foreign policy with a straight-up perspective,” Perdue told Fox News.

But both of Perdue’s claims are false.

Perdue is basing his first claim on a public company in Hong Kong that paid to license two documentaries about war crimes by ISIS terrorists from Ossoff’s film company. The transaction was not initially in Ossoff’s financial disclosure forms but was included in an update.

“These were aired by television broadcasters all over the world,” Ossoff said in October. “He [Perdue] is cherry-picking that there was one Asian TV channel that aired our documentary.”

Ossoff was also never endorsed by the Communist Party USA.

Perdue actually has had significant work with Asia during his career. From 2002 to 2003, he was CEO of Pillowtex, a failed North Carolina textile manufacturer. There, part of his job was to essentially outsource the company’s manufacturing operations to cheaper foreign factories, especially in Asia.

In a 2005 deposition, when asked about his “experience with outsourcing,” Perdue bluntly admitted, “Yeah, I spent most of my career doing that.”

In 2014, Perdue’s then-campaign manager insisted that the comments about outsourcing referred to a “company contracting with an outside source, not the direct shift of jobs overseas.”

In that deposition, Perdue also talked about his work with other companies importing goods from Asia ― including from China ― dealing with companies as far away as Japan, and his time living in Singapore and Hong Kong.

And during his time with Sara Lee, Perdue oversaw a restructuring that closed factories in places like Georgia while expanding operations in Asia.

The Perdue-Ossoff runoff ― triggered because no candidate received a majority of the votes in November ― is one of two Senate contests on the ballot in January. The other is between Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) and Democrat Raphael Warnock, who are competing for an open seat that Loeffler has temporarily filled since January.

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