Fmr Disney CEO Katzenberg, Wife Drop $1.7M Into Biden PAC

Former Disney CEO and movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife dropped more than $1.7 million into the Biden Victory Fund (BVF) in April for President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign, Federal Elections Commission records show.

That money might have Chinese fingerprints on it, too, according to reports.

Katzenberg, who the Biden campaign announced would be national co-chair for the BVF, has long had deep ties to the Chinese government up to and including the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping.

“I’ve been to China every single month for the last 2 1/2 years because it’s a place of incredible opportunity right now,” Katzenberg, then with DreamWorks Animation, was quoted saying in 2014. “We have enough characters and stories to create a unique, new kind of theme park experience. We’re building an animation studio in the middle of Shanghai called ‘Dream Center.'”

That was around two years after DreamWorks announced a multibillion-dollar deal with the Chinese government for a production studio in Shanghai.

Biden, who the House GOP Oversight Committee has alleged has ties to foreign influence peddling with China, had campaigned in 2020 to go easier on China than former President Donald Trump was before the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “They’re not bad folks, folks.”

With Trump and other GOP primary candidates vowing a more hawkish position on China going forward than Biden, China has a vested interest in helping keep the current president in the White House.

Two days after being named national co-chair of the BVF, Marilyn Katzenberg donated $889,600 to the joint fundraising PAC on April 27; and a day later, Jeffrey Katzenberg donated $889,600 more, according to FEC records.

Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg are “maxed-out” donors to Biden’s official campaign Biden for President, too, each donating $6,600 in late April, according to the FEC.

The Katzenbergs are equally open about their ties to the Chinese communist government, too. After Biden played a key role in opening Chinese markets to Hollywood during the Obama administration, he visited with Xi multiple times in 2012 — and sometimes with Katzenberg, according to Fox News.

That DreamWorks Animation studio deal was agreed to that year.

Aynne Kokas chronicled the deep ties between China and Hollywood developing in her book “Hollywood Made in China,” and seeing Katzenberg and Xi close at events showed “the access Katzenberg had to the Obama administration” when the deepest ties were forged, she told the Los Angeles Times.

Katzenberg’s Shanghai deal with the CCP and past donations to former President Barack Obama triggered Securities and Exchange Commission investigations for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as he allegedly bribed Chinese officials to gain access to markets in China; but little information on those investigations was published by mainstream media during the Obama administration, according to Fox News.

Obama once bragged he was proud his administration never had a “scandal.”

Katzenberg is no longer with DreamWorks, but China’s Amazon equivalent, Alibaba, was an initial donor of $1 billion to Katzenberg’s failed streaming venture.

Fox News did not get a response to its request for comment from the Biden campaign.