Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has ties to a Democrat-allied, Chinese Communist Party-tied think tank known as the Humpty Dumpty Institute (HDI). This group was once headed by Mark Epstein, the brother of the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The Humpty Dumpty Institute, once run by the brother of late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has managed to stay largely out of the news despite its ties to the United Nations, US State Department, several members of Congress, global elite, and Chinese Communist Party. Jeffrey’s brother, Mark Epstein, was listed as a Director and main financier according to the most recently listed IRS form from 2018.
National File has learned that Mark Meadows, the former Republican House Freedom Caucus Leader and former Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump, was appointed to the HDI Congressional Advisory Board in 2013, and served in this role as recently as April 2019.
According to public records, it appears HDI has not made its filings available since fiscal year 2018, when Mark Epstein was still listed as a Director and financier. Epstein’s name was recently been removed from the website’s board of directors, however, through an internet archive, National File has discovered that Epstein was listed on the site as recently as December 20, 2020. It is unclear if Epstein is still involved in HDI.
Interestingly, it appears that Meadows was the only Republican member of Congress to have served on the board during this period. In 2018, Meadows was the sole Republican listed alongside 28 Democrat Representatives, including Reps. Adam Schiff, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Al Green, Bennie Thompson, Jim Himes, Frederica Wilson, Hank Johnson, and others.
In August of 2019, the Daily Caller published a report on the institute revealing that the HDI advisory board included Democrat Representatives Adam Schiff, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Maxine Waters, and “only four Republicans.”
While the conservative website attempted to tie Schiff, Wasserman Schultz, Waters, and others to Jeffrey Epstein via their relationship with HDI, the Daily Caller failed to mention that Meadows had so recently been involved with the institute, despite Meadows’ already longtime involvement with HDI when the article was published.
On June 22, 2021, the current Chairman of the HDI, Dr. Al Khalafalla, reposted a photo to Twitter that showed him alongside Meadows and Epstein on Twitter. Khalafalla did not add a caption or context to the image, and the same photo was first posted on September 16, 2014.
Further evidence of Meadows’ seemingly ongoing relationship with the HDI and Al Khalafalla is seen in this photograph posted to Twitter on September 6, 2020, which shows Meadows alongside Al Khalafalla and his wife Debbie Meadows. President Trump has repeatedly touted Debbie Meadows as a strong ally of his America First agenda.
For unknown reasons, as of July 19, 2020, all of Dr. Khalafalla’s tweets have been marked saying “The following media contains potentially sensitive content.”
What could perhaps be the most unreported and concerning aspect of the HDI would be the strong links to their Beijing-headquartered partner, the Taihe Institute, a think tank whose key figures include multiple high-level Chinese Communist Party members, globalist elites and pro-transhumanist corporate technocrats.
Among these are Former Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Commissar and Major General Lei Zhitian, Former CPPCC National Committee member Gu Boping, former World Military and China Army Editor-in-Chief Chen Hu, World Economic Forum (WEF) Associate Director Thorsten Jelinek, PLA Air Force (PLAAF) Group Captain Wang Haili, Graduate School at National Defence University of People’s Liberation Army Associate Dean Quan Yong, China Research Society of Sun Tzu’s Art of War Executive Director Xue Guoan, 12th CPPCC National Committee member Yu Hongjun, Former Xinhua North America Regional Bureau Director Zeng Hu, Perfect World Group Founder and Chairman Chi Yufeng, and Cyberspace Administration of China Vice Director (CAC) Peng Bo.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the military force for the People’s Republic of China, but it ultimately answers to the CCP. It is also the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, and the largest military in the world.
Because the PLA does not ultimately owe its allegiance to a government, instead owing its loyalties to the CCP, it has been described as the armed branch of the CCP that follows a Communist doctrine affirming that “the Party commands the gun.” They are not at the behest of any state or constitution; their sole allegiance is to the CCP itself.
Zhitian, a former Major General in the PLA, is a Taihe Institute Senior Fellow. While not much is known about Zhitian, his former role as a PLA Commissar suggests that he was tasked with bolstering the absolute leadership of the CCP over the Chinese armed forces, ensuring that the military branch organizations were in line with the party.
Haili, a prominent People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) Group Captain, worked in the Harbin Flight Academy and the PLAAF Command College and served as an instructor and headed the teaching and research section of the PLAAFCC, according to the Taihe Institute website, which celebrated his joining of the institute by holding a ceremony in which photographs were taken behind CCP flags and alongside multiple party members. The institute noted that Haili would “strengthen” their research capacity “in the fields of ‘national security and military strategy.’”
Boping, a frequently photographed Senior Fellow at the institute, was a former member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the political advisory body of the PRC and a central player of the CCP’s Front System.
The body consists of CCP delegates, loyal CCP political parties, nominally independent members, and what could be front organizations.
Along with various high-level CCP members, Perfect World Group Founder and Chairman Yufeng is among those on the list of Taihe Institute Senior Fellows. Yufeng originally founded a company called Perfect World Games in 2004, which served as a Beijing-based entertainment industry group that developed and published video games.
After being delisted from NASDAQ in 2015, Perfect World merged with Perfect World Pictures in 2016, began trading on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and was ultimately renamed Perfect World. In 2013, Perfect World Investment & Holding Group was founded and now holds controlling interest in Perfect World.
Jelinek, another notable Senior Fellow at the Taihe Institute, is an Associate Director of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF, headed by Klaus Schwab, is best known for leading the effort into a global dystopian mega-corporate future dubbed the “Great Reset” by many.
As National File previously reported, the WEF’s “Great Reset” plan involves a collaboration between national governments and international bodies to “reset capitalism” with an integrated transnational technocratic welfare/surveillance state by the year 2030. The World Economic Forum is best known for its annual Davos Summit, where thousands of members of the world’s corporate and political elite meet under extreme hi-tech security to discuss global collaboration.
In February, Jelinek tweeted a bizarre statement in which he said “It is not #5G, #IOT, #ArtificialIntelligence but human behavior that perpetuates the current downward spiral of history,” adding that in order to “change #technology we must change humanity.” In the tweet, Jelinek included a strange photo of a digitized human face with what appears to be a circuit board or a microchip where the brain would otherwise be located.
Similarly to Al Khalafalla, many of Jelinek’s tweets are marked as potentially containing “sensitive content.”
The HDI was present at all four “Taihe Civilizations Forums” located in Beijing in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Former Mission to US Embassy to the Holy See Deputy Chief and HDI Executive Director Joseph Merante, as well as HDI Associate Director Morgan DeNicola were photographed at the 2017 Taihe Global Civilizations Forum.
DeNicola’s set of photographs highlight what appears to be a tightly-knit relationship between the HDI, Perfect World, and Taihe organizations, who supposedly “gathered to discuss major issues concerning human civilization and harmonious development, explore root causes as well as possible solutions to facilitate inter-civilizational communication and arrive at a sustainable development of common value.”
The following is a pro-transhumanist promotion video for the CCP, WEF, and HDI-affiliated Taihe Institute during their 2018 Civilizations Forum, where HDI Executive Director Merante was listed as a speaker on page 3 of their website.
The video tackles bizarre questions such as “What kind of individual rights can we grant to human-like robots in the future?,” “Will artificial intelligence replace human labor?,” “Will human thought be captured in the future?,” “What does it mean to be human in the future?,” and “Can I live forever?”
Merante is photographed several times at the 2019 Taihe Civilizations Forum, as revealed on the HDI official website.
Perfect World representatives Robert Hong Xiao and Ruby Wang, as was the case with Mark Epstein, were removed from the HDI website for reasons unknown, though the two are listed along with Epstein as Directors on the 7th page of the HDI’s most recent IRS filing Form 990.
Wang is pictured alongside World Economic Forum Associate Director Thorsten Jelinek at the 2019 Taihe Civilizations Forum.
On February 27, 2019, the HDI celebrated the Taihe Institute’s report on the Chinese Communist Belt and Road Initiative, an overreaching global infrastructure plan aimed to solidify Chinese economic hegemony that many have viewed as a threat to the US. The HDI posted a second press release regarding the BRI on April 29, 2019:
The overarching BRI objective is to develop a global infrastructure controlled by China, with the various “roads” serving as spokes in a wheel that service the hub (mainland China). Another analogy would be a spider’s web expanding ever outward, with Beijing (the “Spider Dragon”) at the center of the web. The infrastructure elements are largely focused on the development of transportation assets that can later be exploited by Beijing to transport the resources and raw materials needed to fuel Chinese manufacturing concerns, as well as support the exportation of finished Chinese goods to overseas markets around the world, including roads, ports, railroads, bridges, etc.
Jelinek is also appears to be an avid supporter of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. He attended Beijing’s BRF in 2019 and took photographs of Chinese President Xi Jinping and WEF Founder Klaus Schwab.
On March 22, 2021, the CCP-tied HDI Board of Directors issued a press release regarding the “Stop Asian Hate” movement, outlining how they were “shocked and and dismayed” with the “rise in violence directed at Asians in the United States.”
Around this time, mainstream media outlets were attempting to obscure the fact that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China, branding the term “Chinese Virus” – a phrase employed by President Trump – as “racist.”
More compelling evidence of the HDI’s ties to the CCP could be ascertained through an examination of a series of tweets posted by Al Khalafalla on December 5, 2020 at precisely 10:18 a.m., of which were also subsequently masked by Twitter for containing “potentially sensitive content.”
In the tweets, Al Khalafalla and Merante are described in Arabic as being “in front of the house where Leader Mao was born in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, accompanied by Chinese State Councilor Zhang, Chinese businessman Michael Shi, and Mayor of Shushan. The invitation to visit China was thanked [sic] by Councilor Zhang after our Institute [HDI] arranged for him to visit US Congress.”
Al Khalafalla deleted the tweets a few weeks later, but National File has obtained a screenshot, which depict Al Khalafalla and Merante alongside the aforementioned Chinese individuals.
In addition, other previous State-level, red-carpet, Chinese Communist military parade-welcomes for the two HDI directors have been observed.
National File attempted to contact Mark Meadows multiple times with the goal of obtaining a statement about his past participation in HDI, and to ask whether Meadows is still involved with the organization. Meadows did not return more than 7 phone calls to his staff, his book publisher, or to him personally made over the course of multiple weeks.
Thor & Woodbird research firm contributed to this report.