Back in the summer of 2024, Governor Sarah Sanders' office told Arkansas a scary story. A company was buying an old factory in Fort Smith, right next to a National Guard base. And according to her team, that company might secretly be a front for Communist China.

It was the kind of story that grabs headlines and makes people afraid. There was just one problem. It wasn't true. And now court records show that Sanders' own staff knew there was no proof — and pushed the story out anyway.

The scary story that wasn't true

On July 23, 2024, Sanders and her Agriculture Secretary, Wes Ward, sent a letter to Attorney General Tim Griffin. They asked him to investigate a Fort Smith property, claiming there was "reasonable suspicion of ownership ties with China and the Chinese Communist Party." They pointed out the site sat close to the Ebbing Air National Guard Base, and made it sound like a national security threat. The attorney general opened an investigation.

The company was Olivet — an American business buying a former Trane factory. Some of its executives have family ties to Taiwan. That matters, because Taiwan is a longtime ally of the United States and a rival of China. The two are not the same. But Taiwan's formal name is the "Republic of China," and that little detail seems to be all the confusion Sanders' team needed.

A few weeks later, the whole thing fell apart. On August 13, 2024, Griffin announced his investigation had found no Chinese ties at all. The company did not violate Arkansas law. The state had to do a complete about-face on its own accusation.

Her own staff called it a "comms stunt"

Here's the part that should make every Arkansan angry. This wasn't an honest mistake. We know that now because the texts came out in court.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's Dale Ellis dug through court documents and found text threads between the attorney general's own staff. In those messages, Griffin and his people called the governor's plan to paint an empty Fort Smith factory communist red "a comms stunt" — short for a communications stunt. They accused the Sanders administration of putting "comms before substance." In plain English: the headline came first, and the facts came second, if at all.

It gets worse. Deputy Attorney General Alex Benton told her co-workers that she had asked the governor's office to do its homework — its "due diligence" — before going public with the accusation that Olivet was a Chinese agent. The governor's office said no. According to Benton, a governor's staffer named Chafer Stanley said they "would rather have a media hit and have to walk it back later."

Read that again. They would rather get the press hit and walk it back later. They knew they might be wrong. They chose the headline anyway.

They mixed up China and Taiwan — then made it worse on purpose

So how did Sanders' office turn an American company into a fake Chinese plot? Partly by getting the basic facts wrong, and partly on purpose.

Sanders' communications director at the time, Alexa Henning, appears to have confused China and Taiwan — two very different places — and then carefully word-smithed the official statements to make Olivet look as sinister as possible. On top of that, internal emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggest the state already knew Olivet was behind the land purchase before it ever announced an investigation, which raises a simple question: if they knew who it was, why pretend it was a mystery threat?

This is the same playbook Sanders runs over and over. Sound the alarm. Grab the headline. Hide the details. When the truth finally comes out, just move on like nothing happened.

Real people, real harm

It's easy to treat this like a political game. It wasn't a game for Olivet.

A real, law-abiding American company got publicly branded as a tool of a hostile foreign power. The accusation made national news. The state's own investigation later cleared the company completely — but by then the damage was done. That's a business trying to invest in Arkansas, hire Arkansans, and use a building that had been sitting empty. Sanders' team smeared them to score political points, then walked it back when the cameras moved on.

This is who gets hurt when leaders care more about looking tough than telling the truth. People and businesses who broke no law pay the price for someone else's headline.

She still won't admit it

When reporters asked Sanders about all this at a press conference, she did what she always does. She didn't admit her office lied. She didn't apologize to the company. Instead she went on the attack and doubled down, insisting a Chinese threat is still out there:

"I think it is a fundamental responsibility of our state, and frankly of our federal government, to protect from Chinese infiltration."

Protecting the country from real threats is a fine thing. Inventing a fake one to get on TV is not. And Sanders knows the difference, because her own staff was warned in writing that the proof wasn't there.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Sarah Sanders built her national career on telling people things that weren't true. As White House press secretary, she admitted to federal investigators that she made up a claim about FBI agents and had no evidence for it. As governor, she bought a $19,000 lectern and then tried to hide how it was paid for. She even tried to gut the state's open-records law so we couldn't check up on her in the first place.

The China stunt fits the pattern perfectly: say the scary thing, grab the headline, and count on us not to read the fine print.

The bottom line

Strip away the politics and here's what's left. Sarah Sanders' office accused an American company of being a Communist Chinese front. Her own attorney general's staff warned, in texts now sitting in court records, that the claim was a "comms stunt" with no proof behind it. Her office said it would rather get the "media hit" and walk it back later. The investigation found nothing. The company was innocent the whole time.

We don't need a governor who treats the truth as optional and real people as props. We're smart enough to see the con. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by the Arkansas Times: "Dem-Gaz brings receipts showing governor's office lied about land purchasers' inexistent Chinese ties" by Austin Gelder, June 18, 2026, drawing on original court-records reporting by Dale Ellis of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.