‘Blood Money’: House Panel Launches ‘Government-Wide’ Investigation Into Chinese Communist Subversion of U.S.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) on Thursday launched a “government-wide” probe into the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ongoing attempt to “target, influence, and infiltrate every sector and community in the United States.”

The probe comes in the wake of Peter Schweizer’s new book, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills AmericansBlood Money landed at number one on the New York Times bestseller list one week after its release by HarperCollins.

Among several bombshells, Blood Money revealed how the Biden family bagged $5 million from the business partner of the “White Wolf,” the head of a gang involved in the drug trade. It also exposed how China is involved in the fentanyl crisis throughout North America. In addition, the book uncovered how the CCP uses TikTok as a “modern day Trojan Horse” to push propaganda into the United States.

“I’m thrilled that Chairman Comer is launching a major investigation on this,” Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and a Breitbart News senior contributor, exclusively told Breitbart News. “I look forward to helping the committee in their efforts.”

Comer’s probe will demand federal agencies provide information on how the United States is combatting the CCP’s warfare that influences several significant sectors:

  • Education
  • Agriculture
  • Critical infrastructure
  • Research
  • Energy
  • Business
  • Space
  • Technology sectors

“Without firing a single bullet, the Chinese Communist Party is waging war against the U.S. by targeting, influencing, and infiltrating every economic sector and community in America,” Comer said in a statement:

We know that this coordinated influence and infiltration campaign by the CCP threatens U.S. military readiness, the technology sector, financial markets, agriculture industry, education systems, and intellectual property. The lives and security of all Americans are affected.

“The Oversight Committee has a responsibility to ensure the federal government is taking every action necessary to protect Americans from the CCP’s ongoing political warfare,” Comer added. “Actions taken by the Committee today are just the beginning and I look forward to full cooperation from agencies as we work to thwart China’s efforts to influence and infiltrate the United States of America.”

Former President Donald Trump expressed interest in Blood Money’s revelations. On Truth Social, he posted a Breitbart News story on Schweizer’s report about how the Biden family bagged $5 million from the business partner of the “White Wolf,” as Breitbart News previously reported:

While Joe Biden was vice president, the Bidens developed a business partnership with a Chinese tycoon named Ye Jianming, the chairman of CEFC China Energy Co., which had strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Throughout Ye’s relationship with the Bidens, he “showered” some members of the Biden family with money, Schweizer reported. Hunter Biden received a three-carat diamond worth $80,000; and in July 2017, Ye’s company gave the Bidens a $5 million, interest-free, forgivable loan.…

Hunter spoke to Ye on a “regular basis” and Ye helped Hunter “on a number of his personal issues” including unspecified “sensitive things,” Hunter explained in emails. Joe Biden also attended a meeting with Hunter, additional business partners, and Ye, Hunter’s business partner Rob Walker told U.S. House of Representative investigators in 2023. “I don’t remember the exact time, but I remember being in Washington, DC, and the former vice president stopped by. We were having lunch,” Walker testified.

But Ye also enjoyed a partnership with the former leader of a Chinese triad called the United Bamboo Gang (UBG), Schweizer detailed in Blood Money.  Ye’s partner’s name was Zhang Anle or, as he is commonly known, the “White Wolf.”

U.S Army Soldier Arrested for Selling Military Secrets to China

A U.S. Army intelligence analyst has been arrested for allegedly selling American military secrets to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Authorities have charged Korbein Schultz, a 24-year-old Army soldier stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky and Tennessee.

On Thursday, Schultz was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, exporting technical data related to defense articles without a license, conspiracy to export defense articles without a license, and bribery of a public official.

He is accused of sending critical military documents to an individual in Hong Kong in exchange for $42,000.

The documents included top-secret information on U.S. weapons systems.

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Former Career US Diplomat Charged With Secretly Spying for Cuban Intelligence for Decades

Manuel Rocha wept as he sat handcuffed in Miami federal court on charges that he engaged in “clandestine activity” on Cuba’s behalf since at least 1981 — the year he joined the U.S. foreign service — including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to U.S. government officials about his contacts.

The complaint unsealed Monday is short on specifics of how Rocha may have assisted Cuba. But it provides a vivid case study of what American officials say are long-standing efforts by Cuba and its notoriously sophisticated intelligence services to target U.S. government officials who can be flipped.

“This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.”

The 73-year-old Rocha, whose two-decade career as a U.S. diplomat included top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, was arrested by the FBI at his Miami home Friday. He was ordered held following Monday’s brief court appearance pending a bond hearing Wednesday. His attorney declined to comment.

The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha attracted the attention of Cuba’s intelligence operatives nor did it describe what, if any, sensitive information he may have provided while working for the State Department and in a lucrative post-government career that included a stint as a special adviser to the commander of U.S. Southern Command.

This image provided by the Justice Department and contained in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint, shows Manuel Rocha. The Justice Department says Rocha, a former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, has been charged with serving as a covert agent for Cuba's intelligence services since at least 1981. Newly unsealed court papers allege that Manuel Rocha engaged in "clandestine activity" on Cuba's behalf for decades, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives. (Justice Department via AP)

This image provided by the Justice Department and contained in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint, shows Manuel Rocha. The Justice Department says Rocha, a former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, has been charged with serving as a covert agent for Cuba’s intelligence services since at least 1981. Newly unsealed court papers allege that Manuel Rocha engaged in “clandestine activity” on Cuba’s behalf for decades, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives. (Justice Department via AP)

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So a guy pushing the Trump Russian collusion story was actually colluding with the Russians. You literally can’t make this up.

Former F.B.I. Spy Hunter Pleads Guilty to Aiding Russian Oligarch

The plea by the former agent, Charles F. McGonigal, represented a remarkable turn for a man who once occupied one of the most sensitive and trusted positions in the American intelligence community, placing him among the highest-ranking F.B.I. officials ever to be convicted of a crime.

Appearing before Judge Jennifer H. Rearden of Federal District Court on Tuesday, an emotional Mr. McGonigal stood up and said that he had broken the law after his retirement in 2018 from the bureau, where he had been an expert in Russian counterintelligence, by aiding an effort by Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire under U.S. sanctions, to investigate a rival.

“I have understood what my actions have resulted in, and I’m deeply remorseful,” Mr. McGonigal said, his voice breaking. “My actions were never intended to hurt the United States, the F.B.I. and my family and friends.”

The conspiracy charge he pleaded guilty to was newly filed by prosecutors on Tuesday, replacing the original indictment handed up by a grand jury in January that had included more serious charges of violating U.S. sanctions and laundering money. Under the plea deal, the maximum prison term Mr. McGonigal could serve is five years, instead of the sentence of up to 20 years he might otherwise have faced.

In court, Mr. McGonigal, 55, told the judge that he had known he could not legally perform services for Mr. Deripaska, who was placed on a U.S. sanctions list in 2018. He said he had understood that his work in the second half of 2021 to collect “open source” negative information on Vladimir Potanin, an oligarch who was a business competitor of Mr. Deripaska, was likely to be used in an effort to get Mr. Potanin placed on the sanctions list as well.

He admitted knowingly arranging for payments to be routed from a Russian bank through a company in Cyprus, and then to a corporation in New Jersey, to conceal that the source of the money was Mr. Deripaska.

Judge Rearden scheduled Mr. McGonigal’s sentencing for Dec. 4.

In the initial charging document, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said that Mr. McGonigal and an associate had received payments totaling more than $200,000 for their work investigating Mr. Potanin under a contract with an aide to Mr. Deripaska. They also hired subcontractors for the investigation, the indictment said.

But on Tuesday, Mr. McGonigal told the judge that in the end he had netted only $17,500, and he agreed to forfeit that amount.

The plea brings the prosecution of Mr. McGonigal in New York to a relatively speedy conclusion after fewer than seven months. He had been arrested by F.B.I. agents in January at John F. Kennedy Airport upon his return from an overseas business trip.

Mr. McGonigal still faces a second indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Washington on charges that accuse him of concealing his acceptance of $225,000 from a businessman and of hiding dealings in Eastern Europe while working for the bureau. Mr. McGonigal has pleaded not guilty to those charges but is in talks to resolve them; his lawyer, Seth D. DuCharme, told the judge overseeing the Washington case that he expected to provide an update on the talks after Labor Day.

Although Mr. McGonigal was privy to highly classified information, a three-year investigation found no evidence that he had passed secrets to foreign adversaries, according to people with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing matter. The F.B.I. concluded that Mr. McGonigal’s misconduct was limited to corruption, the people said.

Mr. Deripaska, who has been called “Putin’s oligarch” because of his close relationship with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, is among the best known of the businessmen who became rich as Russian state resources were doled out to friends of the Kremlin after the fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Deripaska and others were also accused last year by federal prosecutors in New York of violating U.S. sanctions through real-estate deals and other actions, including trying to arrange for the oligarch’s girlfriend to give birth to their two children in the United States. Mr. Deripaska, a Russian citizen, is unlikely to be extradited to face the charges in the near future.

The prosecutors in Mr. McGonigal’s New York case have said that before the U.S. government expanded sanctions in 2018, following Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election, Mr. McGonigal had reviewed a preliminary sanctions list with Mr. Deripaska’s name on it. Around the same time, they suggested, Mr. McGonigal was seeking a connection with Mr. Deripaska by arranging a New York Police Department internship for the daughter of one of the oligarch’s aides. (A senior police official has said it was actually a “V.I.P.-type tour.”)

After Mr. McGonigal retired, he and his co-defendant in the New York case, a court interpreter and former Russian diplomat named Sergey Shestakov, referred the same Deripaska aide to a law firm for help getting sanctions removed, according to the original charges in New York.

While negotiating the law firm agreement, Mr. McGonigal met with Mr. Deripaska in Vienna and London, referring to him in electronic communications as “the Vienna client,” prosecutors have said. Mr. Deripaska paid the law firm $175,000 a month; the firm passed $25,000 on to Mr. McGonigal as a consultant and investigator, the prosecutors said.

Mr. Shestakov has pleaded not guilty to violating U.S. sanctions, money laundering, conspiracy and making false statements to the F.B.I. His lawyer, Rita M. Glavin, did not respond to a request for comment.

The deal to investigate Mr. Potanin was made with an aide to Mr. Deripaska in the spring of 2021, prosecutors said.

In November of that year, Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov were trying to obtain “dark web” files, purportedly about $500 million in hidden assets held by Mr. Potanin, in exchange for a payment of up to $3 million, Rebecca Talia Dell, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court Tuesday. Before that transaction could be completed, F.B.I. agents seized Mr. McGonigal and Mr. Shestakov’s electronic devices, bringing their work for Mr. Deripaska to an end, prosecutors have said.

Fresno Lab: China’s Operation to Exterminate Americans

An “unlicensed laboratory” in Reedley, California run by Prestige BioTech, a Nevada company fronting for parties in China, was raided in March. On site were at least 20 potentially infectious pathogens including those causing coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes. The seizures at the lab strongly suggest China’s regime is preparing to spread diseases in America. Pictured: A laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — widely believed to be the source of the Covid-19 pandemic. (Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images) 

Prestige BioTech, a Nevada company fronting for parties in China, was caught operating an “unlicensed laboratory” in Reedley, California in March. State and Fresno County officers raided the facility, and the FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since been participating in the investigation.

The illegal operation housed white lab mice—773 live and more than 175 dead—that were genetically engineered to carry disease. Authorities also found medical waste and chemical, viral, and biological agents. There were on site at least 20 potentially infectious pathogens including those causing coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes.

The lab is “mysterious,” as the California Globe news site proclaimed. We know enough, however, to be alarmed.

The lab was supposed to be producing COVID-19 and pregnancy tests, but the facility contained items inconsistent with that explanation. The seizures at the lab strongly suggest China’s regime is preparing to spread diseases in America, undoubtedly in the months before a war.

“This kamikaze lab—unsecured, poorly contained, makeshift, containing a couple dozen pathogens near a population center—cannot be a one-off,” Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, told Gatestone. “It is, I believe, a part of a large Chinese military operation to spread disease throughout the American population.”

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Code Kept Secret for Years Reveals Its Flaw—a Backdoor
A secret encryption cipher baked into radio systems used by critical infrastructure workers, police, and others around the world is finally seeing sunlight. Researchers say it isn’t pretty.

FOR MORE THAN 25 years, a technology used for critical data and voice radio communications around the world has been shrouded in secrecy to prevent anyone from closely scrutinizing its security properties for vulnerabilities. But now it’s finally getting a public airing thanks to a small group of researchers in the Netherlands who got their hands on its viscera and found serious flaws, including a deliberate backdoor.

The backdoor, known for years by vendors that sold the technology but not necessarily by customers, exists in an encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure. It’s used to transmit encrypted data and commands in pipelines, railways, the electric grid, mass transit, and freight trains. It would allow someone to snoop on communications to learn how a system works, then potentially send commands to the radios that could trigger blackouts, halt gas pipeline flows, or reroute trains.

Researchers found a second vulnerability in a different part of the same radio technology that is used in more specialized systems sold exclusively to police forces, prison personnel, military, intelligence agencies, and emergency services, such as the C2000 communication system used by Dutch police, fire brigades, ambulance services, and Ministry of Defense for mission-critical voice and data communications. The flaw would let someone decrypt encrypted voice and data communications and send fraudulent messages to spread misinformation or redirect personnel and forces during critical times.

Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities—five in total—in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but the flaws remained unknown because encryption algorithms used in TETRA were kept secret until now.

The technology is not widely used in the US, where other radio standards are more commonly deployed. But Caleb Mathis, a consultant with Ampere Industrial Security, conducted open source research for WIRED and uncovered contracts, press releases, and other documentation showing TETRA-based radios are used in at least two dozen critical infrastructures in the US. Because TETRA is embedded in radios supplied through resellers and system integrators like PowerTrunk, it’s difficult to identify who might be using them and for what. But Mathis helped WIRED identify several electric utilities, a state border control agency, an oil refinery, chemical plants, a major mass transit system on the East Coast, three international airports that use them for communications among security and ground crew personnel, and a US Army training base.

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Joe Biden Proclaims That He ‘Sold a Lot of State Secrets’ During White House Meeting.

Joe Biden is either the most shameless person ever to hold the presidency or he’s mentally gone. That’s the story after a video surfaced on Monday showing the president proclaiming “I sold a lot of state secrets” during a meeting at the White House.

As RedState reported, Biden hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last Thursday, and things were as awkward as ever. At one point, the president faced confusion during the Indian national anthem, apparently mistaking it for his country’s own. The next day, a state dinner was held in which Biden brought along Hunter Biden, fresh off his guilty plea, despite the fact that AG Merrick Garland was there.

But if that wasn’t enough to convince you that nothing matters to the current administration, the president decided to announce the following in front of Modi and others.

Remarks by President Biden and Prime Minister Modi of the Republic of India in Meeting with Senior Officials and CEOs of Technology Companies

He didn’t even have to get to the second part before things went haywire, with Biden once again saying “anyway” after obviously losing his train of thought in public. That happens very often to the president. Physically, his voice and pacing sound frail, almost as if he’s tired or on medication. Then he just blurts out that he’s “sold a lot of state secrets.”

Well, alrighty then. I suppose there are a few possible explanations here, some more likely than others. The first possibility is that Biden’s dementia is hitting him so hard that he just accidentally admitted to doing what he’s credibly accused of, which is mishandling classified national security information and accepting bribes from foreign entities. Certainly, the president has had a bad case of advanced age throughout his tenure, and with his condition comes a tendency to just blurt out things he shouldn’t. Who can forget him searching the room for a deceased congresswoman at an event set to honor her?

I suspect that’s not what happened here, though. It’s more likely that his ongoing senility caused him to deliver another one of his patented “jokes” that leaves everyone in the room perplexed, wondering just what the heck is going on. I’d challenge you to look at Modi’s reaction in the video and try not to laugh. The Indian PM isn’t taking anything that comes out of Biden’s mouth seriously.

Even still, it certainly takes a bit of chutzpah to make such a joke when you are currently under investigation for accepting bribes and you’ve already been shown to have illegally held classified documents in your garage. Biden doesn’t care, though, because as I said earlier, nothing matters. He knows he can say whatever he wants and the press will shrug. Compare that to the allegations of a Freudian slip that would be raging had this been a Republican president saying what he said.

Past that, how does any of this help the United States? If you were Modi, having formed a strong, dependent relationship with Russia, would you change course to ally with Joe Biden? What comfort is offered in doing so? The White House isn’t a retirement community, and there are real consequences to having a president who is so obviously out of it. I suspect we’ll keep suffering those consequences until voters make a change.

While the clueless losers chant “RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!” , our goobermint has allowed Chinese commies to run amok in the U.S.

Chinese Intel Arm Quietly Operates ‘Service Centers’ In 7 US Cities

A Chinese intelligence agency quietly operates “service centers” in seven American cities, all of which have had contact with Beijing’s national police authority, according to state media reports and government records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD) — which at least one U.S. government commission has characterized as a “Chinese intelligence service” — operates so-called “Overseas Chinese Service Centers” (OCSCs) that are housed within various U.S.-based nonprofits. OCSCs were ostensibly set up to promote Chinese culture and assist Chinese citizens living abroad, according to Chinese government records.

State media reports, Chinese government records and social media posts show that during a 2018 trip to China, U.S.-based OCSC representatives met with Ministry of Public Security (MPS) officials. During the meeting, state security officials demonstrated how they’re leveraging new technology to conduct “cross-border remote justice services” overseas.

MPS is China’s national police authority and has been referred to as “China’s FBI” by China experts. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says MPS also conducts covert “intelligence and national security operations far beyond China’s borders,” including “illicit, transnational repression schemes” on U.S. soil.

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PROJECTION, BIDEN STYLE

The New York Post reports on President Biden musing to the press before he boarded the plane to hit the campaign trail in Philadelphia yesterday. The White House has helped us along with a transcript. Here we have a pure case of projection, Biden style:

President Biden kicked off his first day of campaigning for re-election by making excuses for communist China — saying that President Xi Jinping never meant to fly a spy balloon over sensitive American military sites earlier this year.

“I don’t think the leadership knew where it was, and knew what was in it, and knew what was going on,” Biden told reporters Saturday as he headed to Philadelphia for his first campaign rally of the 2024 election. “I think it was more embarrassing than it was intentional.”

Biden does everything thing but thank the Chinese Communists for taking an interest in our military installations. What do they have on him? I should like to think that no one can be this stupid without motivation.

As I noted in “Lost horizon” and again in “The Biden two-step,” the CCP regime goes out of its way to show its disrespect of Biden. “Contempt” is probably more like it. Gordon Chang shows how in the 1945 column: “Secretary Blinken’s Visit To China Is One Giant Mistake.”


Who on earth could have seen this coming?

Homeland Committee Chairman: China Likely Sending Military Personnel Into U.S.

On Wednesday, Congressman Mark Green (R-Tenn.), Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, claimed that the People’s Republic of China is likely sending military personnel into the United States via the southern border with Mexico.

According to Just The News, Chairman Green made the revelation at a press conference, where he also announced a new investigation into Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In his remarks, Congressman Green said that “Chinese Nationals, many of whom are military-aged men” and have ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are crossing the southern border among the hordes of third-world illegal aliens, and have similarly been released into the United States by the Biden Administration.

“We have no idea who these people are and it’s very likely, using Russia’s template of sending military personnel into Ukraine, China is doing the same in the United States,” said Green, who also said that the claims were verified by a Border Patrol sector chief.

In concurrence with Green’s remarks, the Homeland Security Committee released a report on Wednesday revealing that the number of apprehensions of Chinese nationals at the southern border has increased significantly since Biden took power.

At least 10,000 Chinese illegals were encountered at the border during the time period between October 2022 and April 2023, the report states. During the same period of time in the previous year, that number was down to just 2,200.

The revelations highlight a major national security risk associated with the Biden Administration’s open-borders approach to immigration. Biden and the Democratic Party as a whole have vowed to provide amnesty to millions of illegals, as well as numerous free taxpayer-funded benefits, including education, healthcare, and housing.

Emails Show Biden State Department Sought to Protect China During Spy-Balloon Fiasco.

With so much domestic rancor going on as the next election season heats up, it’s worth remembering that there are serious foreign policy issues to deal with. It’s also worth remembering that the Biden administration is doing its level best to screw every single one of them up.

A new report backed by leaked emails and inside sources is shedding light on a shocking policy Joe Biden is pursuing in regard to China. According to Reuters, during the Chinese spy balloon fiasco that captivated the nation in early 2023, embattled Secretary of State Antony Blinken was actually seeking to protect the communists.

When an alleged Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States in February, some U.S. officials were confident the incursion would galvanize the U.S. bureaucracy to push forward a slate of actions to counter China.

Instead, the U.S. State Department held back human rights-related sanctions, export controls and other sensitive actions to try to limit damage to the U.S.-China relationship, according to four sources with direct knowledge of U.S. policy, as well as internal emails seen by Reuters.

Rick Waters, deputy assistant secretary of State for China and Taiwan who leads the China House policy division, said in a Feb. 6 email to staff that has not been previously reported: “Guidance from S (Secretary of State) is to push non-balloon actions to the right so we can focus on symmetric and calibrated response. We can revisit other actions in a few weeks.”

The sources said many measures have yet to be revived. The decision to postpone export licensing rules for telecom equipment maker Huawei and sanctions against Chinese officials for abuses of Uyghurs, has damaged morale at China House, they said.

In other words, instead of punishing China for its insanely provocative violation of US airspace and sovereignty, Blinken had his lackeys pause major human rights and trade measures. That included already planned actions to sanction Chinese tech companies like Huawei and to combat China’s genocide of the Uyghurs.

It gets worse. Though the buck stops with Blinken, he apparently farmed out US policy toward China to Wendy Sherman, his second-in-command.

Speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, they said Blinken had largely delegated China policy duties to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the United States’ second ranked diplomat.

Who is Wendy Sherman? She’s the China-loving official who led the lobbying effort against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act of 2021. So not only is Blinken derelict in his duties by passing off the biggest US foreign policy issue in existence to an underling, but he gave those duties to someone with a long history of being suspiciously soft on the Chinese.

Sherman was also at the forefront of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, infamously proclaiming that the “Taliban seek legitimacy.” If there’s a diplomat with worse instincts, I’m not sure who it would be. Sherman is just terrible and has managed to be on the wrong side of just about every major foreign policy issue she’s been involved with.

But as I’ve speculated in the past, it’d be a mistake to chalk all this up to sheer incompetence. The Biden administration continually operates as if it is bought and paid for by the Chicoms. From COVID to economics, the Chinese are allowed to dominate. It’s long past time for people to start asking why.

Biden Administration Paves Way for Confucius Institute Affiliate Schools to Receive Federal Funding

The Defense Department in late March announced that it would grant waivers to allow schools to host chapters of the Confucius Institute, a Chinese Communist Party-backed program that Beijing uses to peddle influence and steal intellectual property from American universities. The department’s waiver program is a response to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which barred American colleges and universities from receiving federal dollars if they maintain Confucius Institute chapters.

Lawmakers say the Defense Department is subverting federal law.

“The Chinese Communist Party is subverting U.S. institutions and Joe Biden is sabotaging legislation to stop them,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Select Committee on China, told the Washington Free Beacon. Banks added that the Biden administration has essentially “greenlit China’s espionage and malign influence operations on college campuses.”

The workaround comes amid warnings from the intelligence community that American colleges are a “soft target” for Chinese spies. China has opened at least 100 Confucius Institutes in the United States since 2008, with China pouring more than $158 million into them. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned that these outposts are “ultimately beholden to the Chinese government” and pose an espionage risk.

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None of them are good

Here are the 7 biggest revelations from the US leaks so far.

The biggest leak of classified documents in a decade created a sprawling crisis in Washington this week as records detail alleged U.S. spying on allies, insights into American thinking on the war in Ukraine and at least two neutral countries mulling plans to support Russia.

Pentagon officials are still reviewing the documents for validity and the Justice Department is overseeing a criminal investigation of the leak.

The documents have circulated online since March and possibly as early as January before picking up attention last week after a New York Times report.

There may be more documents to come, but the leak has already done a lot of damage, forcing crucial U.S. allies to respond in what has become an arguably embarrassing incident for Washington.

Here are the seven biggest revelations in the documents so far.

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Clearview AI Scraped Billions of Facebook Photos for Facial Recognition Database

Facial recognition firm Clearview has built a massive AI-powered database of billions of pictures collected from social media platforms without obtaining users’ consent.

In late March, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That told BBC in an interview that the company had obtained 30 billion photos without users’ knowledge over the years, scraped mainly from social media platforms like Facebook. He said US law enforcement agencies use the database to identify criminals.

Ton-That disputed claims that the photos were unlawfully collected. He told Business Insider in an emailed statement, “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.”

However, privacy advocates and social media companies have been highly critical of Clearview AI.

“Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email to Insider. 

Ton-That told Insider the database is not publicly available and is only used by law enforcement. He said the software had been used more than a million times by police.

“Clearview AI’s database is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement, and is not available to the general public. Every photo in the dataset is a potential clue that could save a life, provide justice to an innocent victim, prevent a wrongful identification, or exonerate an innocent person.”

According to critics, using Clearview AI by the police subjects everyone to a “continuous police line-up.”

“Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face,” Matthew Guariglia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BBC. He said, “It’s far too invasive.”

The AI-driven database has raised privacy concerns in the US to the point where Sens. Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders attempted to block its use with a bill requiring Clearview and similar companies to obtain consent before scraping biometric data.

In 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Clearview AI, calling it a ‘nightmare scenario’ for privacy. The ACLU managed to ban Clearview AI’s products from being sold to private companies but not the police.

Clearview AI is a massive problem for civil liberties. The easiest way to prevent Clearview AI from scraping photos from your social media accounts is to not be on social media. Alternatively, if you wish to maintain a social media presence, ensure that the images you post are not publicly accessible on the web.

U.S. Military Completes Recovery of Chinese Balloon, Now Analyzing Its ‘Guts’

WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) – The United States said on Friday it had successfully concluded recovery efforts off South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on Feb. 4, and investigators are now analyzing its “guts.”

But U.S. and Canadian authorities also announced they had called off searches for three unidentified objects shot down over last weekend, without locating any debris

President Joe Biden said this week the U.S. intelligence community believed the other three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions – not China’s spy program.

The last of the debris from the Chinese balloon, which was downed by a Sidewinder missile, is heading to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the U.S. military’s Northern Command said.

Reuters was first to report the conclusion of the recovery efforts for the suspected Chinese spy balloon, which were halted on Thursday.

“It’s a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that’s now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico,” said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.

Kirby said the United States had already learned a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the United States.

“We’re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of,” he told a White House news briefing.

The U.S. military said Navy and Coast Guard vessels that had been scouring the sea for nearly two weeks have departed the area.

“Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted,” Northern Command said in a statement.

The U.S. military has said it believes it has collected all of the Chinese balloon’s priority sensors and electronics as well as large sections of its structure, elements that could help counterintelligence officials determine how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance information.

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Federal bureaucraps working with foreign operatives to spy on U.S. & Canadian citizens. Well, to be honest, nothing surprising.

Cascade County sheriff breaks up federal investigation at gun show

Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter on Saturday broke up an investigation carried out in apparent coordination between federal and Canadian authorities at a Great Falls gun show, saying those agencies had not contacted his office beforehand.

Although state law does not require federal investigators to obtain approval from local law enforcement to conduct operations, the agents left the fairgrounds “reluctantly” and without issue. Slaughter has positioned himself as a “constitutional sheriff,” which theorizes sheriffs are the ultimate authority in their county — above local, state and federal officials — raising questions in this incident about possible friction between layers of law enforcement.

According to a Sept. 24 report compiled by the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office, Slaughter and a deputy responded to a complaint that a man at the Montana Expo Park was acting suspiciously by taking photographs of vehicles. According to the fairgrounds director, the man was driving around the property in a black SUV with Canadian license plates, but never entered the show.

A deputy contacted the man, who identified himself as Richard Kurina, a Canadian police officer with the Lethbridge Police Department working with a Royal Canadian Mounted Police task force. According to the sheriff’s office report, Kurina said the task force was designed to catch Canadians smuggling illegal firearms into Canada and that he was with another officer, Agent Craig Howe with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

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You simply can not make this up.

Army doctor tried to give military medical info to Russia

A U.S. military doctor — who previously made headlines as the first known active duty Army officer to come out as transgender — and their spouse were federally indicted in Maryland on Wednesday for attempting to pass sensitive medical information about members of the military to a person who they believed worked for the Russian government.

Maj. Jamie Lee Henry, 39, previously a staff internist at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with a secret-level security clearance, and their spouse, Dr. Anna Gabrielian, 36, an anesthesiologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, communicated and met with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Russian embassy employee.

Army officials did not immediately respond to a request for information regarding Henry’s current service status and military records.

During an Aug. 17 meeting in a Baltimore hotel room, Gabrielian told the undercover agent that “she was motivated by patriotism toward Russia to provide any assistance she could to Russia, even if it meant being fired or going to jail,” the indictment stated.

Previously, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she reached out directly to the Russian embassy offering assistance from her and her spouse, though she reportedly did not tell Henry of this interaction, according to the indictment.

“My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia, I’m able to help as much as I want,” Henry told the undercover agent in another meeting later that night, the indictment stated. “At that point, I’ll have some ethical issues I’ll have to work through,” Henry said, to which Gabrielian reportedly replied, “you’ll work through those ethical issues.”

Additionally, during the discussion, Henry shared that they had looked into volunteering for the Russian Army after its invasion of Ukraine began but noted their lack of combat experience prevented them from joining.

Also in the conversation, Gabrielian instructed Henry to read the book “Inside the Aquarium: The Making of a Top Soviet Spy,” a narrative about recruitment and training for the Soviet Union’s intelligence organization.

The initial meeting was followed by another interaction the next week between Gabrielian and the agent in which the medical professor called her spouse a “coward” for being concerned about violating government health privacy law.

Any issues Henry had, however, allegedly dissipated.

On Aug. 31, at a hotel in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Gabrielian provided the agent with medical information related to the spouse of a person currently employed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, and medical information related to someone described as an Air Force veteran.

“Gabrielian highlighted to the [undercover agent] a medical issue reflected in the records of [the military member’s spouse] that Russia could exploit,” the indictment said.

In the same meeting, Henry provided medical information related to five patients at Fort Bragg, including a retired Army officer, a current Department of Defense employee and spouses of active and deceased Army veterans.

Henry, a transgender woman, previously told BuzzFeed in 2015 that to their knowledge they were the first active duty service member to change their name and gender.

The couple is charged with eight counts of conspiracy and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information.

Both were scheduled to make an initial appearance at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore on Thursday.

If convicted, the pair face a maximum of five years in federal prison for conspiracy and a maximum of 10 years in federal prison for each count of disclosing personal medical information.

“Henry is currently assigned to Fort Bragg, N.C. as a Staff Internist (61F/Medical Corps) with a rank of Major,” Army spokesperson Matt Leonard told Army Times via email, adding that Henry entered active-duty service in May 2007 and has no combat deployments.

Trump/Russia investigator hid ties to Russian billionaire.

If there is one thing you can count on with The Swamp it’s that every time they accuse a Republican of doing something, they themselves are likely to be guilty of that very thing themselves.

That may be the case with Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. In an exclusive report by Military and Defense Insider it was revealed that McGonigal appears to be under grand jury investigation for–get ready–improper ties to Russia.

 

McGonigal was no bit player in the Russia Russia Russia drama: he was one of the key instigators who got the ball rolling back in 2016. When he was at the FBI he was quite the bigwig, playing major roles in a number of high profile cases.

Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning, busted Bill Clinton’s national security advisor Sandy Berger for removing classified material from a National Archives reading room, and led the search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. In 2016, when reports surfaced that Russia had hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee, McGonigal was serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington. In that capacity, he was one of the first officials to learn that a Trump campaign official had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, sparking the investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Later that year, FBI Director James Comey promoted McGonigal to oversee counterintelligence operations in New York.

He has apparently been swept up into a grand jury investigation that is looking into his ties to a Russian billionaire and work he appears to have done with his representatives. It isn’t totally clear what exactly is being investigated and how central McGonigal is to the inquiry, but it looks pretty bad.

Late last year, according to internal court documents obtained by Insider, US attorneys secretly convened a grand jury that examined the conduct of Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City. The Justice Department declined to comment on what the grand jury was investigating or whether it remained ongoing. But a witness subpoena obtained by Insider seems to indicate that the government, in part, was looking into McGonigal’s business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election.

The subpoena, issued in November, requests records relating to McGonigal and a shadowy consulting firm called Spectrum Risk Solutions. A week after the subpoena was issued, a Soviet-born immigrant named Sergey Shestakov said in a separate filing that McGonigal had helped him “facilitate” an introduction between Spectrum and Deripaska’s aide. The filing also states that McGonigal helped introduce the aide to Kobre & Kim, a New York law firm that specializes in representing clients who are being investigated on suspicion of “fraud and misconduct.” Shestakov, who has been identified on TV panels as a former Soviet foreign ministry official and former chief of staff to the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, reported receiving $33,000 for the referrals.

It’s not clear that anything McGonigal did for the sketchy Russians was illegal, but he failed to report doing any work for them. That in itself may be a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Depending upon the exact scope of what the former FBI agent did he may or may not have violated the law.

While it wouldn’t necessarily have been illegal for McGonigal to work on behalf of Deripaska, failing to disclose activities covered by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such as lobbying and public relations, is punishable by a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison. Deripaska was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for acting as an agent for the Kremlin, and has been accused of ordering the murder of a businessman. “If McGonigal is mixed up in any way shape or form with Deripaska, that strikes me as unseemly, to put it politely,” says Tim Weiner, the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”

There is little doubt that McGonigal’s ties to a sketchy Russian oligarch are clear evidence that he isn’t as squeaky clean as a top FBI official would like to appear. After all, one of the great perks of having had such a position is peddling the prestige of having had such a job. He certainly has been capitalizing off his status, and getting tied up with sanctioned Russian agents of the Kremlin might hit him in the pocketbook. Perhaps that is why he decided to hide his relationship.

It’s impossible to know at this stage whether McGonigal’s super-friendly ties to Russians played a role in his zeal to get Donald Trump, but these revelations certainly raise questions. Despite the constant repetition that Trump was Russia’s puppet, he was actually far more antagonistic in policy to Russia than Obama ever was. And we know that Hillary Clinton used her ties in Russia to stir up suspicion that Trump was colluding with Russia (she colluded with Russians to fake a narrative that Trump colluded with Russia; how ironic), faking the whole Steele Dossier narrative with Russian help.

Was McGonigal somehow involved? Did he have any contemporaneous or future financial interests? At the moment nobody but the grand jury knows.

These days McGonigal presents himself as a pious and wise man who is using his expertise to defend truth, justice and the American way. He compares the FBI to the FSB favorably.

Since he left the FBI, McGonigal has continued to trade on his expertise in counterintelligence. In 2020, months after his reported assistance to Deripaska’s aide, he appeared on a panel at the Atlantic Council, where he condemned the corruption of Russia’s security services. “You are seeing an erosion in any rule of law as it relates to the FSB,” he said. “It would be akin to having in the United States the FBI as a rogue element, operating at the behest of the highest bidder.”

Unfortunately too many Americans have come to suspect that the FBI actually is a rogue element, operating at the behest of, if not the highest bidder, then the most powerful one.

As Donald Trump would say: sad.

China in Charge at U.S. Lab.

The Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), part of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), focuses on “dangerous pathogens” with the “potential to be used as weapons around the world.”

This same GNL signed agreements with three Chinese labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), that gave China the power to destroy “secret files, materials and equipment, without any backups. “The agreements applied to “all cooperation and exchange documents, data, details and materials,” were renewable every five years, and the confidentiality terms remaining in force even after termination.

As The Epoch Times reports, the UTMB now concedes that officials signed “poorly drafted” agreements, and that the signing could violate Texas law. Also in play are violations of a more serious order.

The Galveston National Lab is a 2008 creation of NIAID, the division of the National Institutes of Health headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci since 1984. Dr. Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more lethal and transmissible, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, controlled by Communist China and not accountable to American officials.

In addition to some $4 million in U.S. funding, which Fauci laundered through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV received a cargo of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu. As Israeli molecular biologist Dr. Dany Shoham documented in China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese scientist came to head the special pathogens program at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.

The viruses that were “surreptitiously shipped from the NML to China included Machupo, Junin, Rift Valley Fever, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, and Hendra. In 2017-18 alone, Dr. Qiu made at least five trips to the Wuhan lab.

NIAID boss Fauci promotes the theory that the COVID-19 virus arose naturally in the wild. This is pure speculation, not science, which involves observation, testing and replication. Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Robert Redfield found evidence of a laboratory origin for COVID. That resulted in death threats, but no word of any FBI investigation. More recently, evidence for a lab origin has been mounting.

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China tried to obtain internal info and build a network of informants inside the Federal Reserve, says a new GOP Senate report.

The Chinese government tried to obtain sensitive internal information and build a network of influence and informants inside the Federal Reserve, according to a new report released Tuesday by Republican staff members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The report from the committee staff of Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, the ranking member, did not conclude whether the attempts, which included the detention of a Federal Reserve employee, were successful.

Since at least 2013, the report found, China has targeted the Federal Reserve System and sought to recruit U.S.-based economists to share information in exchange for money and other benefits. Thirteen Federal Reserve employees working across eight of the Fed’s 12 locations were identified as the “P-Network” by a Federal Reserve analysis that deemed them to be of potential concern, according to the report.

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