Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Sen. Darline Graham’s husband, Larry Nordone, is a senior executive at a company that merged with a Chinese weapons maker. Graham, of course, is running for her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat, and she opposes “depending on Communist China” for manufacturing.
It was an embarrassing enough revelation for the campaign, but the friction between her husband’s career and her stated politics, it turns out, goes significantly further than that. Graham’s husband’s company is also linked to a Chinese firm that the U.S. sanctioned in 2024 for heavily arming Russia in its war against Ukraine—in blatant contrast to the Graham family’s staunch support for Ukraine.
Nordone is a senior executive at Cosmox Outdoors’ subsidiary, Cosmox North America. Cosmox Outdoors, merged in 2021 with the Chinese weapons maker Zhongzhou Machinery Works (ZZM). Until recently, ZZM listed two major Chinese arms companies as “partners and clients.”
The two Chinese companies are Poly Technologies and Norinco; they have both been sanctioned by the U.S. Poly Technologies was hit with U.S. sanctions in 2024 for providing “sensitive military technologies” to Russia to facilitate its invasion of Ukraine, according to C4ADS, a U.S. intelligence-adjacent research outfit. Norinco is a military and aerospace conglomerate whose history of providing arms to Iran dates back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and remains on the Treasury Department’s restricted list.
Graham’s brother, Lindsey Graham, was the Senate’s most vocal champion of arming Ukraine against Russia. He died suddenly, according to his staff, shortly after returning from a visit to Ukraine, where he toured a drone factory. Darline Graham was appointed to replace her late brother and won the Republican nomination in South Carolina. She is facing Democrat Annie Andrews in a surprisingly close race.
Darline Graham was the lead sponsor on a bill, named for her brother and signed into law in September, that introduced a new set of sanctions on Russia and Iran. Though Trump signed the bill into law, he followed it with an executive order that rolled back its provisions.
“Lindsey believed this bill, which he worked on for well over a year, would help achieve [a peaceful resolution in Ukraine] through squeezing [Russian President Vladimir] Putin economically and forcing his customers to reevaluate the relationship with Russia,” Graham reportedly said at a press conference in September.
The Bush administration sanctioned Norinco in 2003 for allegedly selling missile-related goods and technology to Iran, although the sanctions were lifted in 2005.
In a debate with Andrews on October 11, Graham argued that President Donald Trump ought to continue pursuing the war on Iran. “Why in the world would we stop now when they’re still dangerous?” Graham said, adding that she believed the U.S. was close to winning the war. “Again, I think the president wants to end the war. I know he does. We all want the war to end. But I support a strong military. I believe in peace through strength.”
Graham’s campaign, Cosmox, and ZZM did not respond to questions from Drop Site. Nordone’s employer scrubbed the reference to Norinco as one of its “partners and clients” from its website after inquiries from the Post:
After The Post reached out with questions about ZZM’s website touting its ties to the Chinese defense industry, a spokesperson for ZZM distanced the manufacturer from the defense companies, saying ZZM no longer does business with them. ZZM and Cosmox Outdoors’ websites were then taken down and replaced with a notice to users that the sites are undergoing maintenance.
ZZM’s site reappeared days later with the mention of its own “military-grade” production capabilities removed, as well as mentions of Norinco and Poly Technologies. Cosmox Outdoors’s site removed a tile from its homepage about ZZM but still linked to ZZM’s site from Cosmox Outdoors’ “Firearms” tab.
Rachel Chen, a spokesperson for Cosmox, answered the Post’s questions on behalf of both ZZM and Cosmox, telling the paper, “Cosmox Outdoors has had no commercial dealings with CSGC [China South Industries Group Corporation], NORINCO, or Poly Technologies.” The websites saying otherwise, said Chen, were out of date.
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