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https://twitter.com/michaelbeatty3/status/1181784201072263169
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-spy-who-drove-her-dianne-feinstein-and-chinese-espionage
Connected?
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Define 'backchannel'. |
michaelbeatty tweet: https://archive.fo/6xPQ8
2013-Dianne Feinstein announces California opens a California-China trade & investment office..
Listen as she explains her "special connection" with Shangai leaders going back to the 1970's. #WAR
@realDonaldTrump
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9:11 PM - 8 Oct 2019
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The Spy Who Drove Her: Dianne Feinstein and Chinese Espionage
by Ethan Epstein | September 10, 2018 04:40 AM
https://archive.fo/s3bep
And we now know that China, a much more worrisome long-term threat to the United States than a declining Russia, has been active in the Bay Area as well.
Five years ago, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who then chaired the Intelligence Committee, was approached by the FBI. The bureau had learned that a staffer in her San Francisco office was a Chinese operative “run†out of Beijing’s consulate in that city. It appears that he had started as a legitimate employee but was at some point, likely on a visit to the East, turned by a member of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
The staffer had served the senator for some two decades as a general office lackey, a liaison to the local Chinese community, and, most important, the senator’s chauffeur whenever she was in San Francisco, her hometown. Driving Ms. Feinstein would have been a plum assignment for an intelligence operative; it allowed the Chinese access to the senator’s comings and goings and who she met with, as well as to any conversations she might have had in the car and any documents she may have left in it.
According to a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, the FBI did not believe the driver had managed to nab anything confidential. And after being approached by the bureau, the senator promptly fired him. It also appears that, ultimately, no charges were filed against the driver. Feinstein’s press secretary ignored requests for comment on this story; her office has issued standard boilerplate to media outlets saying that the senator was “mortified†by the revelation that she had a spy on her payroll.
Despite her efforts to brush matters aside, the Feinstein spy scandal is significant. It’s hard to make out through the media and political class’s myopic obsession with all things Russia, but Chinese espionage in America is epidemic. In June 2015, Chinese hackers stole the sensitive personal data (Social Security numbers, addresses, etc.) of more than 20 million Americans when they breached the Office of Personnel Management’s servers. That provided Beijing a trove of information, not to mention copious blackmail opportunities. Military secrets have been targeted repeatedly, and college campuses are also host to scores of Chinese assets and operatives. Meanwhile, Beijing’s plan to dominate the pharmaceutical, aerospace, artificial intelligence, robotics, self-driving car, clean energy, and sundry other industries of the future—“Made in China 2025,†it’s called—is largely based on espionage, notably the purloining of American technology. And those are just the operations we know about.
In other words, Dianne Feinstein’s driver might not amount to a hill of beans compared to the OPM hack. But it’s another star in a vast constellation of Chinese espionage against the United States; not to mention a clever way to get close to the chair of an important Senate committee, one privy to sensitive information. So it’s puzzling that the Washington Post has mentioned the Feinstein matter only once, and this in an opinion column rather than the news pages. The nation’s paper of record, the New York Times, hasn’t seen fit to publish even a squib on the matter. I asked the Times’s deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weisman, why his paper hasn’t deigned to mention the story. Uncharacteristically for the garrulous Twitter-er, who this week has found time to weigh in on Crazy Rich Asians, the U.S. Postal Service, and the crowd capacity of Texas A&M’s football stadium, Weisman declined to answer. Even the Los Angeles Times, catering to a readership that Feinstein represents, has ignored it.
SCREENSHOT: https://postimg.cc/jLK0p5K7 |