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Saturday, October 31, 2020

Highly Recommended--A Collusion Tale: China and the Bidens

Andy McCarthy has an excellent article today (h/t Mike Edmonson):


A Collusion Tale: China and the Bidens

Not only were the Bidens’ Chinese business contacts known to have ties to the regime; they also may have been clandestine agents.


There's actually no real "may have been" about it. McCarthy cites Hunter Biden's own description of a key partner, Chi Ping Patrick Ho, as “the f***ing spy chief of China.” As McCarthy amply documents, there is ample reason to accept Biden's assessment that Ho, if not the actual "f***ing spy chief of China," was certainly serving an intelligence function for China. And Ho worked directly for another top Chinese intelligence operative, Ye Zianming.

McCarthy tells the whole story very clearly, despite the dense detail. I highly recommend it.

I also draw attention to the role of FISA in the FBI investigations into these China operatives. There's no doubt at all that the FBI would have been well aware of the the Chinese cultivation of the Biden family--and other US politicians. That awareness, by now, has certainly spanned quite a few years. That's what the use of FISA makes possible, but there is a complication when it comes to use of evidence gather under FISA in a criminal trial. McCarthy explains:


FISA Surveillance

United States intelligence agencies clearly took notice. As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports, our government obtained at least one FISA surveillance warrant that yielded evidence against Chi Ping Patrick Ho, one of CEFC’s heavyweights. The surveillance authorized by the FISA court included electronic eavesdropping as well as physical searching.

As Russiagate and the challenges to investigating it have made painfully clear, FISA surveillance is classified. The government applications and evidentiary showings that lead to it are closely guarded national-security secrets. Even on the rare occasions when evidence derived from FISA surveillance is used in court, as it was in Ho’s eventual prosecution for corruption crimes, the lawyers for the defendant and the trial prosecutors are not informed of the factual basis that predicated the surveillance. The full breadth of the counterintelligence investigation is not revealed publicly. The full range of targets remains secret, and we learn neither how long the monitoring went on nor what specific intelligence-gathering methods were employed.

What we get is just a bare-bones notice, such as the Justice Department provided during Ho’s prosecution, advising that FISA evidence would be offered at the trial. (In the inevitable litigation over admissibility of this evidence, the public is permitted to see only bland legal discussions about the FISA statute and precedents. The underlying, classified facts that triggered the surveillance remain secret.)

The CEFC scenario is a good example of why revelations about counterintelligence investigations are sparse, and why U.S. spy agencies often push against Justice Department use of evidence collected through foreign-intelligence surveillance operations, even to the point of trying to block indictments. Prosecution triggers discovery rules — the production to the defense of relevant information in sensitive government files. Moreover, when it is disclosed — even without providing much detail — that evidence has been collected under FISA, this alerts the foreign power at issue that its operations have been penetrated and monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies. That’s why intelligence agents, even if they stumble upon provable criminal activity, hate prosecutions: Once the FISA hand is tipped, the foreign power takes steps to shut down whatever activities may have been compromised.

To be clear, a FISA warrant would not have been issued, enabling surveillance that yielded evidence against a top CEFC official, unless the FISA court found probable cause of clandestine activity on behalf of a foreign power. We don’t know exactly how many CEFC officials were under surveillance, or who they were, but it emerged at Ho’s trial that the FBI had been monitoring CEFC since at least 2016. Government surveillance resulted in key corruption evidence against Ho, who worked directly for Ye. Indeed, the Times noted that, within days of Ho’s arrest, Ye was interviewed by the FBI.


Not only do we not know "exactly how many CEFC officials were under [FISA] surveillance," but we also don't know their full range of US and other Western contacts, their agents, the influential persons whom CEFC was cultivating.

To avoid the discovery requirements that would force the US Government (DoJ and the FBI) to reveal to foreign governments the full scope of their knowledge of foreign intelligence operations against the US, the US Government may seek to tailor retaliatory actions--prosecutions, sanctions of various sorts--in ways that avoid disclosure requirements. They may even, as McCarthy expressly notes, prefer to avoid such actions in the interest of further intelligence gathering against foreign threats, calculating that--knowledge being power--more knowledge is preferable to the relatively temporary gratification of indictments and prosecution. 

These are the tradeoffs that are part of the cost of living in a constitutional republic.


18 comments:

  1. Very detailed article, I was wondering about the brothers corruption.

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  2. To me, the article lays out a devastating case for Biden Family corruption.

    There are many 'interesting' comments to the article on the nationalreview.com website, including a not insignificant number which see absolutely nothing wrong with the Biden venture. Joe was out of office, so what did he do wrong?

    Talk about a 'cultural' divide...

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    Replies
    1. That cultural divide is the one between conservatives who care about their fellow citizens and Neocons who would prefer to replace their fellow citizens, whom they hold in contempt. Sadly, NR made itself a home to the latter.

      Delete
    2. @Mark

      Yes. And as a result, NR may soon become irrelevant.

      Perhaps I'm repeating myself (my wife regularly accuses me of this) but this is why I prefer to see all of the connected and seemingly unconnected issues of today not so much as a function of "Trump", but as a function of a major unwinding and realignment of political and ideological positions thought (as recently as a few years ago) to be immutable.

      Some commentators are saying that Trump will win as much as 25% of the Black vote or maybe more. Same thing (to varying degrees) may be happening with the Hispanic and gay vote.

      Trump may be a catalyst, but things are changing. Bigly.

      Delete
    3. For more on that cultural divide, written in Jan. 2016 (!!), see Archdruid J.M. Greer's prediction of a DJT victory that year, base on an analysis of the wage Class backlash vs. the salaried Class' arrogant rigging of most everything, to enrich the latter at the expense of the former (at
      https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/ ).

      Delete
    4. NeverTrump Review?

      If there was absolutely nothing wrong with what Biden was doing (and no doubt scheming grifters of similar feathers rationalize it that way), why the "paranoid" efforts to conceal his involvement?

      Delete
  3. McCarthy paints a picture that I think is damning at many levels.

    The Biden Crime Family has been in business for many many years, and given what happened to Flynn and Manafort, recent history reveals that DOJ/FBI was certainly capable of busting this case wide-open long before the Democrats nominated Joe for president.

    That is no trivial thing because there is non-zero chance that a real Manchurian candidate may soon get elected (largely via voter fraud and an uniformed electorate).

    So why is OK to persecute Flynn and railroad Manafort, but Hunter (who in addition to being a corrupt sell-out may also be a dangerous pedophile) gets a pass? What does that say about the integrity and competence of DOJ/FBI?

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  4. Andy adds more thoughts to the article https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-mccarthy-report/episode-103-judicial-jumble/ e.g., most likely special counsel etc.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, Andy only says that in the case of a Biden win. I expect Trump to win, and in that case there's no way Barr appoints a special counsel. Now, Andy also makes the argument for a special counsel in this case because it would be the case of a pending investigation of a president elect, so arguably a conflict for anyone whom Biden could appoint to DoJ.

      Delete
  5. Why is the mainstream press now talking about the Biden's
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/abc-news-breaks-mainstream-media-blackout-hunter-biden-story

    Something is happening in the background...

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    Replies
    1. My guess is that it's defensive, because they expect a Trump win and they fear that real action could be taken by DoJ. At the same time, they've waited long enough that they hope it won't harm him too much. I think that's they're reasoning. But I also think Trump is surging.

      Delete
    2. I speculate that now its dawned on dems that if Biden wins, the enema a special counsel would provide isn't something they would relish since they have been dabbling in it also. Way too much unwanted attention to their deals.

      Delete
    3. "if Biden wins, the enema a special counsel would provide isn't something they would relish...."
      Very unlikely to matter much, as such a special counsel's impact would be blunted by, if nothing else, MSM blackouts.

      Delete
  6. Biden was the Vice President in 2015 and strongly expected by many to pursue the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016. In November or December of 2015 the New York Times published--with documents sourced to the Clinton campaign according to Lee Smith's latest book "The Permanent Coup"--in depth articles on the Burisma scandal.

    Lee Smith hypothesizes this story was a play to let Joe know "challenge Hillary for the nomination and we'll expose your own corruption." Could it be that just in case Slow Joe didn't get the point Barry sat him down and showed him the FISA intercepts of the China deals, and said you're going to sit this one out if you know whats good for you???

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  7. SWC's latest:
    >> https://twitter.com/shipwreckedcrew/status/1323302520026902528[/tweet] <<

    Excellent overview of the Chinese end of the Biden Crime Family enterprise, how they fit together, and the likelihood that most of whatever Hunter communicated related to these things was picked up under a FISA on the Chinese partners.

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  8. "The Biden Rat Years "

    >> https://apelbaum.wordpress.com/2020/11/02/the-biden-rat-years/ <<

    Must see analysis of Biden documents by Yacoov Aplebaum.

    He claims it is evidence of hidden income not being reported to IRS.

    See also the other articles immediately after this one, especially about 6-figure payments from one of Hunter's business entities to "POI-1."

    ReplyDelete