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| By Ben Weingarten AUGUST 8, 2018 |
Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s warm relationship with and advocacy for
Communist China go back decades and involve millions, if not billions, of
dollars.
“I sometimes say that in my last life maybe I
was Chinese.”—Sen. Dianne Feinstein
As media,
intelligence agency, and political scrutiny of foreign meddling is seemingly at
its apex, a story with big national security implications involving a
high-ranking senator with access to America’s most sensitive intelligence
information has been hiding in plain sight.
The story
involves China and the senior U.S. senator from California, and former chair of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Democrat Dianne Feinstein. It was
buried eight paragraphs into a recent Politico exposéon
foreign efforts to infiltrate Silicon Valley, as a passing example of political
espionage:
Former intelligence officials…[said] Chinese intelligence once recruited
a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the
source reported back to China about local politics. (A spokesperson for
Feinstein said the office doesn’t comment on personnel matters or
investigations, but noted that no Feinstein staffer in California has ever had
a security clearance.)
Later
comes additional detail:
According to four former intelligence officials, in the 2000s, a
staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco field office was reporting
back to the MSS [China’s Ministry of State
Security, its intelligence and security apparatus]. While this
person, who was a liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges
were never filed against him. (One former official reasoned this was because
the staffer was providing political intelligence and not classified
information—making prosecution far more difficult.) The suspected informant was
‘run’ by officials based at China’s San Francisco Consulate, said another
former intelligence official. The spy’s handler ‘probably got an award back in China’
for his work, noted this former official, dryly.
This
anecdote provides significantly more questions than answers. For starters: Who
was the spy? For how long was the spy under surveillance? What information
about “local politics” was the spy passing back to China? Just how close was
the spy to the senator? Did law enforcement officials sweep vehicles and other
areas for listening devices? Was there an investigation into whether others in
the senator’s circle may have been coordinating with Beijing?
Did the
senator expose herself to potential blackmail, or the public to danger through
leakage of sensitive, highly classified information? Is firing really the
proper punishment for providing political intelligence to a foreign power?READ MORE
