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
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-Mo.) addresses the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority
Policy Conference at the U.S. Capitol Visitor's Center Auditorium in
Washington, on June 27, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Hawley Introduces Security
Bill Addressing Data, Privacy Concerns
BY
November 19, 2019 Updated:
November 19, 2019
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A bill (pdf) to fight
the flow of Americans’ sensitive personal data to China and other countries that threaten national security
was introduced on Nov. 18 by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in the wake of a hearing
that raised concerns over Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok.
TikTok had
said it’s hired a U.S.-based auditing firm to analyze the app’s data security
practices, in a letter to lawmakers at a Senate Judiciary
Subcommittee hearing chaired by Hawley on Nov. 5.
During the hearing, Hawley said all it
would take is “one knock on the door of their parent company based
in China from a Communist Party official” for the data to be sent to
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He requested that TikTok executives testify
before the panel—nobody showed up.
Beijing-based
ByteDance Technology Co., which owns TikTok, is facing a national security
review over its $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly in
2017.
“Current law makes it far too easy for
hostile foreign governments like China to access Americans’ sensitive
data,” Hawley said in a Nov. 18 statement.
“Chinese companies with vast amounts of personal data on
Americans are required by Chinese law to provide that data to
Chinese intelligence services.”
“If your child
uses TikTok, there’s a chance the Chinese Communist Party knows where they are,
what they look like, what their voices sound like, and what they’re watching,”
he continued. “That’s a feature TikTok doesn’t advertise.”
In TikTok’s
letter to lawmakers, TikTok U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas said the
company stores all U.S. user data in the United States, with backup redundancy
in Singapore. While TikTok claims the Chinese regime doesn’t have jurisdiction
over the content of the app, lawmakers have noted that ByteDance is governed by
Chinese laws.
Hawley said
U.S. companies operating in China also have these risks, as Chinese law allows
the communist regime to seize data from American companies operating in China
“whenever it wants, for whatever reason it wants.” The legislation names China
and Russia specifically over concerns relating to data privacy and
security.
In order to
enter the Chinese market, some American companies agree to give
sensitive data to Beijing in exchange. FBI Director Christopher
Wray testified that Chinese law “compels U.S. companies that are operating
in China … to provide whatever information the government wants, whenever it
wants.”
“We should expect foreign surveillance
efforts from China to use platforms like TikTok because they are more modern
and attract a younger, easily influenceable crowd,” Charity Wright, a
cyber threat intelligence adviser at IntSights with 15 years of experience with
the U.S. Army and the National Security Agency, told The Epoch
Times earlier this month.
The Chinese
communist regime has representatives in almost every large company in China,
Wright said. The concerns over TikTok come amid broader anxiety over
forced technology transfers from U.S. companies to Chinese authorities
and intellectual property theft.
Over the past 12 months, TikTok has been
downloaded more than 750 million times, according to research
firm Sensor Tower; which is more than new users of Facebook,
Youtube, or Snapchat in the same time period. In the first quarter of this
year, TikTok was the most downloaded
application worldwide on the app store.
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.
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.”
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