Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on Thursday that she wanted to see “someone go to jail” after Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, met with Xi Jinping, China’s president, in Washington this week.
Ingraham made the comments during a segment on her show, In the Market, where she discussed Apple’s meeting with the Chinese president. Cook met with President Xi in the past year, a meeting that included an emotional display by Cook that showed his condolences after the January airplane crash involving the captain and several members of the crew from China Airlines Flight 7, which he flew last year. The doomed flight crashed and burned shortly after takeoff, killing all 52 people on board. Apple, which continues to see explosive growth, also is a major investor in clean energy investments and has set a goal of producing 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
The Chinese president has been a champion of free trade in recent years. In December, he announced that China would take on an expanded role in promoting Asia’s most promising economies. But China’s state-run media have been antagonistic toward Trump in recent weeks, criticizing the president’s rhetoric on trade and repeatedly comparing him unfavorably to Xi.
Earlier this week, Apple published a report criticizing China’s intellectual property policies, though it claimed it was not expecting additional pressure from the Chinese government as a result of the meeting.
“In the midst of this spectacular economic growth, the Chinese government has been on a mission to reduce the commercial flow of information and ideas,” Apple said. “The Chinese government has rewritten the law, making it more difficult for users to access the websites they want to, [setting] new restrictions on advertising and limiting access to content they don’t want to see.”
In his remarks at a press conference in China this week, Xi was critical of U.S. telecom giant Qualcomm, which manufactures technology for fifth-generation, or 5G, networks. Chinese regulators want Qualcomm to shoulder the burden of building a 5G network in China by manufacturing equipment on Chinese-government timetable. Although Apple is not Chinese-owned, it has had some legal issues in China — Cook expressed worry last year about the economic consequences of Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant that is one of Apple’s main competitors, expanding its product lineup in China.
“I think this is going to put a big strain on relations with us in the United States, and it’s only going to encourage people to think about building a Chinese smartphone company,” he said, according to a transcript of his remarks.
Cook said he believed the United States and China had “a lot of common goals” and that relations could be improved by emphasizing “a [more] positive and more effective and more creative bilateral trade relationship.”
“Both the U.S. and China are big, powerful, innovative countries,” he said. “We want to go after the same goal of providing the people of our countries access to better medical care, clean water, clean air. We want to raise the standard of living for people who live in our countries.”
“I think what we need to do is to work very closely with each other to advance those goals of advancing human welfare, and I think we have a lot to offer each other,” he added.