• December 21, 2015: Bloomberg LP global executive vice president Kevin Sheekey met with Jiang as well as Zhang Fuhai and Zhang Hongbin, respectively the director general and deputy director general of the SCIO Internet Affairs Bureau. They run an arm of the Chinese regime that deals with Internet censorship. Sheekey would become Michael Bloomberg’s campaign manager for his 2020 presidential run.

• June 7, 2017: Kevin Sheekey, who was then vice president of government relations at Bloomberg LP, again met with communist propaganda minister Jiang. According to the Chinese government, “they talked about China-U.S. media exchanges and cooperation, the introduction of Chinese stories to the world, and efforts to promote healthy and stable relations between the two countries.”

According to Everytown for Gun Safety—the successor group to Mayors Against Illegal Guns—Thomas Menino, the late Boston mayor, first approached Bloomberg in 2006 with the idea to convene a group of mayors to “discuss how to stem the tide of gun violence and how to make their cities safer.” Around that time, according to multiple sources, Brady president Paul Helmke—a former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana—also encouraged Bloomberg to lend his political brand and fortune to the struggling movement. Helmke had been working with pollster Mark Penn, now famous for his role in Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. Penn’s business partner, Doug Schoen, has long been Bloomberg’s pollster. The two had put together a pitch deck proposing a new frame for the gun debate: Illegal guns.

“It tested better, and it allowed us, Democrats, [and] gun control activists to take the high ground of law enforcement,” a former Bloomberg aide familiar with the presentation told Mother Jones. Helmke brought the deck to Bloomberg—who at the time, like Helmke, was a Republican—and asked him to chair and give seed money to a new Brady-backed initiative called Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

This struck Bloomberg as a good idea, one that a former staffer described as both a “head and heart interest” for the mayor. But at the urging of longtime aides like Kevin Sheekey, who now runs his presidential campaign, and John Feinblatt, who leads Everytown, Bloomberg opted to do it independently of the anemic Brady Campaign. “It was, among some people who worked with the mayor, a conscious effort to pick an issue around which he could raise his national profile,” the former staffer recalls. “What the fuck did we need Brady for?”

So Bloomberg and Menino held a summit at Gracie Mansion, New York’s official mayoral residence, in April 2006 with 15 other mayors to begin to chart the organization’s course.