Sunday, November 24, 2019

CHINESE SPIES IN AMERICA - BUT IS HE PALS WITH SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN? - “All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon

DIANNE FIENSTEIN AND HER PIMP HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM, WILL DO ANYTHING FOR A BUCK!


GET THIS BOOK!


FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!




IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.

“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com


Senator Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President

Win McNamee/Getty Images
  9 Oct 20192,419
5:44

A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings with the communist regime.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March 2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight, however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China. To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. For basically not challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR, sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In 1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum reportedly had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by Shanghai Pacific Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to colleagues, even once claiming “that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices. Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed against him,” Politico reported in 2018, speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president. Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California, having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”




Ex-CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years in Chinese Espionage Conspiracy

Ex-CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years in Chinese Espionage Conspiracy
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A former CIA officer was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for conspiring to deliver classified information to China in a case that touched on the mysterious unraveling of the agency’s informant network in China but did little to solve it.
The former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, pleaded guilty in May to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents starting in 2010, after he left the agency. Prosecutors detailed a long financial paper trail that they said showed that Lee received more than $840,000 for his work.
Lee, an Army veteran, worked for the CIA from 1994 to 2007, including in China. After he resigned, he formed a tobacco company in Hong Kong with an associate who had ties to the Chinese intelligence community. Lee then began meeting with agents from China’s Ministry of State Security, who assigned him tasks he admitted to taking on and offered to “take care of him for life.”
While working in Hong Kong in 2010, Lee reapplied for employment with the CIA but misled U.S. officials repeatedly in interviews about his dealings with Chinese intelligence officers and the source of his income.
Around the time Lee began speaking to Chinese agents, the CIA was rocked by major setbacks in China as its once-robust espionage network there began to fall apart. Between 2010 and 2012, dozens of CIA informants in China disappeared, either jailed or killed, embroiling the agency in an internal debate about how Chinese intelligence officers had identified the informants. Many within the agency came to believe that a mole had exposed U.S. informants, and Lee became a main suspect.
But FBI agents who investigated whether he was the culprit passed on an opportunity to arrest him in the United States in 2013, allowing him to travel back to Hong Kong even after finding classified information in his luggage. FBI agents had also covertly entered a hotel room Lee occupied in 2012, finding handwritten notes detailing the names and numbers of at least eight CIA sources that he had handled in his capacity as a case officer.
The investigators apparently decided that by continuing to quietly monitor Lee, they might glean more clues about the disappearing CIA informants in China. But even after his arrest in 2018 on the same charge the CIA was prepared to bring in 2013, they were unable to determine whether Lee was involved in the disclosures to Chinese intelligence operatives.
Because of Lee’s plea agreement, in which he admitted to one count of possessing information classified as secret — a lower level than top secret — prosecutors asked for a relatively lighter sentence of roughly 22 to 27 years, rather than life in prison.
But prosecutors argued that even if Lee never turned over information to Chinese intelligence officers, the fact that he shared his knowledge of U.S. intelligence work with Chinese agents alone could have a chilling effect on the CIA’s source-building efforts.
“It makes it difficult to recruit people in the future if they know the CIA isn’t protecting their people,” said Adam L. Small, a federal prosecutor in Northern Virginia, where Lee was charged. “These are people who put their names and lives in his hands.”
The sentence for Lee is the latest in a string of recent cases in which U.S. intelligence workers have been handed lengthy prison terms for espionage connected to China. In announcing Lee’s sentence, Judge T.S. Ellis III said that a hefty sentence was necessary to deter others from jeopardizing U.S. intelligence.
In May, another CIA case officer, Kevin Patrick Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling classified documents to a Chinese intelligence officer for $25,000. Ellis, who presided over that case as well, decided that a life sentence for Mallory was excessively harsh even though prosecutors showed he successfully transmitted secret information.
In September, Ron Rockwell Hansen, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, received 10 years in prison for attempting to pass along defense secrets.
Lee’s lawyers argued that the largely circumstantial case against him was considerably weaker than others in which defendants were charged with espionage, and that speculating that the unexplained payments he received were compensation for information that harmed CIA operations was “a bridge too far.”
Although Lee pleaded guilty to conspiring with Chinese agents, lawyers on both sides conceded that there was no direct evidence that Lee ever provided any of the classified information in his possession to the Chinese government. The CIA has not shown that the sources listed in Lee’s notes faced retribution or harm, Lee’s lawyers said.
“What the government is describing is their worst possible nightmare,” said Nina J. Ginsberg, one of Lee’s lawyers.
In announcing the sentence, Ellis said he was not convinced that Lee’s interactions with Chinese intelligence officers were benign, and that it is common in espionage cases to never fully uncover the extent of illicit dealings.
While he acknowledged that Lee, a naturalized citizen born in Hong Kong, had done a great deal with his life as an American — four years in the Army, a 13-year career with the CIA — Ellis appeared unmoved.
“That gets erased,” he said, “when you betray your country.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2019 The New York Times Company

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