Young Kim chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific, whose remit covers China, Taiwan and the South China Sea. She also sits on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Her campaign describes her as "one of the leading critics of the Chinese Communist Party."

On August 18, her campaign announced it was giving away $5,200 it had accepted from James Su, a Southern California media executive whose radio network Reuters exposed as Chinese state-backed, and whose company later registered as a foreign agent.

It made that announcement three weeks after the FBI searched his house.

The timeline

• Su is the founder and president of EDI Media Inc., a major Chinese-language media company in the U.S.
• In November 2015, a Reuters investigation reported that another Su company, G&E Studio Inc., was 60 percent owned by a subsidiary of China Radio International, the Chinese state broadcaster. The FCC and the Justice Department opened investigations within days.
• Su gave Kim $2,700 in 2018 and $2,500 in 2021, per Federal Election Commission records first reported by Politico's California Playbook. He was photographed with Kim at a 2018 event.
• On March 2, 2022, EDI Media registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, naming XinMin International, Inc. as its foreign principal and describing the work as coordinating the printing of the U.S. edition of Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News until 2018.
• On July 28, 2026, FBI agents searched Su's West Covina home and his office in a reported federal investigation into possible foreign influence.
• On August 18 — after the searches were reported and reporters started asking — Kim's campaign said it would give the money away.

Su has not been charged in connection with the investigation, and that matters. This isn't a story about a donor's guilt.

It's a story about what the chairwoman of the East Asia panel did with money from a man whose ties to Chinese state media had been public for a decade, and when.

The defense, and the problem with it

Kim's campaign spokesman, Chris Pack, made two arguments.

The first: scale. "Since 2018, Young has raised more than $30 million from nearly 200,000 donors," he said, noting the $5,200 came in years ago and that the campaign "had no knowledge of the allegations now being reported against him."

That's fair as far as it goes. No campaign vets 200,000 donors personally, and the specific FBI investigation is new.

But Su's ties to Chinese state media are not new. Reuters laid them out in November 2015, and the FCC and the Justice Department opened investigations the same week. The 2021 donation arrived six years after all of that was on the record — and it went to a member of Congress who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee and would go on to chair its East Asia and Pacific panel. Her campaign then held the money for more than four years after EDI Media registered as a foreign agent in March 2022.

Kim's second defense is that she's a hawk: she has "even been targeted by the CCP and threatened with arrest."

That's true, and it's to her credit. It also cuts the other way. A member who built her national profile on confronting Beijing is precisely the member who should have noticed a donor whose radio network Reuters had already exposed as Chinese state-backed — and precisely the member for whom "we didn't know" is the least comfortable answer available.

Her own party's candidate said it plainest

Because of California's redistricting, Kim is now running against fellow Republican incumbent Ken Calvert in the redrawn 40th District. His spokesman, Calvin Moore, put the criticism in terms no Democrat needed to supply:

"She didn't return the money because it was the right thing to do but because she got caught and the media started asking questions about her ties to Su."

Moore added that voters "deserve an explanation as to why she turned a blind eye to foreign influence for years."

We'd note the source: Calvert is trying to beat her, and he finished first in the June all-party primary with 34.9% to Kim's 20.6%. He is not a neutral observer.

But the factual core of what he said isn't in dispute. The money sat there for five years. It moved when the story broke.

And then there's how she gave it away

This is the detail that says the most about the campaign's instincts.

Kim's campaign chose to donate the $5,200 to organizations supporting victims of human trafficking and prostitution. A worthy cause. But Pack couldn't announce it without turning it into an attack, describing the recipients as helping "women like those Congressman Calvert solicited while serving in Congress."

Read that again. Confronted with questions about foreign-influence money, the campaign's response was to convert its own ethics cleanup into an opposition-research hit.

That is not what accountability looks like. It's what a campaign looks like when it has decided the only real question is who wins the news cycle.

The pattern

Kim bills herself as a moderate. Her record keeps landing somewhere else:

• She promised she wouldn't vote for a budget that cut Medicaid, and did it four times.
• Her "Stop DEI Act" is one sentence long and bans something that's already illegal.
• She introduced an SEC bill about "commonsense" reform that was already a title of the bill gutting the accounting watchdog created after Enron.
• And by the count of the constituents who track it on a website, she has not held a single in-person town hall since taking office in January 2021 — more than five years — prompting a #WhereIsYoungKim campaign just to get her to appear.

Meanwhile, more than $5.5 million has been spent on her behalf by super PACs, and finance, insurance and real estate have put $1.68 million into her campaign this cycle — while she sits on the Financial Services Committee that writes their rules.

The through-line is a member who takes the money, holds the gavel, and explains later.

What CA-40 should ask

Young Kim's answer to this is that she didn't know. Fine. Then the follow-up questions are simple:

Who else in her donor file has registered as a foreign agent? Does the chairwoman of the East Asia panel screen her contributions against the public foreign-agent registry? And if she does not — why not?

Voters in California's 40th District are entitled to a member of Congress who checks before the FBI does.

Source

Rep. Young Kim donates campaign contributions from Chinese-American media mogul under FBI investigation — Zain Khan, New York Post, August 18, 2026. Contribution records first reported by Politico's California Playbook. Kim's subcommittee chairmanship per her own office's announcement, "Rep. Young Kim to Serve as East Asia & Pacific Subcommittee Chairwoman in 119th Congress."