Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) employed a Chinese spy for over 20 years, allegedly without knowing it, and now claims to be “mortified” that she could have spent two decades being secretly watched by Beijing.
Upon the discovery of the staffer’s identity, he was summarily fired and the whole affair was kept quiet — until now.
In a story published by Politico about spying in Silicon Valley, the fact that there was a spy on Feinstein’s staff was but an afterthought.
From Politico:
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. 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.
MSS is the Ministry of State Security — China’s main foreign intelligence agency — and they were able to plant a spy in the office of one of the country’s most publicly recognized lawmakers. The source who dropped this bombshell claims that the agent was handled by Chinese officials working out of that country’s San Francisco Consulate.
By the way, it is reported that the spy was recruited by Beijing while on a trip to China.
The San Francisco Chronicle added additional details of the role of the Chinese asset and the coverup that followed his outing as a spy. Phil Matier and Andy Ross reported: “A local source who knew about the incident confirmed to us that the FBI showed up at Feinstein’s office in Washington, D.C., about five years ago to alert the then-chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that her driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying.”
There you go. While serving as the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein was employing a Chinese intelligence agent. In her office. In the Senate. Where she received classified intelligence briefings.
Don’t forget, Feinstein was also a member of the so-called Gang of Eight who are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch. They are granted extraordinary access to sensitive intelligence data that is withheld from the rest of Congress.
Of course, Senator Feinstein insists that the spy she employed for over 20 years had “no access to sensitive information” and she points out that he was never prosecuted.
A Daily Caller investigation has revealed the name of the accused spy: Russell Lowe.
Daily Caller reveals:
All the details of a former, longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein staffer who’s accused of relaying information to Chinese intelligence services while working for the California Democrat point to Russell Lowe, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has determined.
Lowe worked for 20 years in Feinstein’s San Francisco office, where he was a staff liaison to the Asian-American community before leaving approximately five years ago. All those details match up with the descriptions of the Chinese spy Feinstein reportedly employed.
So, despite earlier reports that the spy was Feinstein’s driver, it appears that he may have had other responsibilities in the senator’s office.
It is nearly laughable that the Daily Caller would report that the spy left Feinstein’s employ. Yes, he left because the FBI suspected him of spying for the Chinese communist government!
Feinstein has refused to provide any excuse for her negligence, choosing rather to release the following explanation:
Five years ago the FBI informed me it had concerns that an administrative member of my California staff was potentially being sought out by the Chinese government to provide information. He was not a mole or a spy, but someone who a foreign intelligence service thought it could recruit.
The FBI reviewed the matter, shared its concerns with me and the employee immediately left my office. He never had access to classified or sensitive information or legislative matters. The FBI never informed me of any compromise of national security information.
See? Nothing to worry about. He wasn’t a mole. He was simply an agent of the Chinese foreign intelligence agency. Why the fuss?
Some of the fuss has something to do with Feinstein’s close ties to the Chinese government, formed while she served for ten years (1978-1988) as the mayor of San Francisco.
First, San Francisco and Shanghai are sister cities. That relationship was formed in 1980, during Feinstein’s administration as mayor. She worked with Jiang Zemin, former mayor of Shanghai, to establish the sisterhood of their cities.
Jiang, who went on to become president of the People’s Republic of China from 1993-2003, earned his reputation as a ruthless ruler, becoming infamous for his crackdown on the Falun Gong, banning their religious practice and imprisoning more than 100 million of them for meditating after his order was handed down outlawing that activity.
Reportedly, Jiang also approved a policy that permitted organ harvesting from prisoners.
Feinstein’s friendly relationship with the Chinese extended to satisfying Beijing’s wishes regarding Taiwan.
In order to court the favor of the Chinese communist regime, then-mayor Feinstein demanded that the organizers of the Chinese New Year parade stop displaying the flag of the Nationalist Chinese, the symbol of the free Chinese government in Taiwan.
Don’t worry about it, though, Feinstein said. She explained that China was only a “socialist” country.
In a story published in 2010, Feinstein said, “There was originally this kind of anti-communist view of China. That’s changing…. China is a socialist country but one that is increasingly becoming capitalistic.”
And, thanks to Senator Dianne Feinstein, their spies found it very easy to spy on the United States.
In this story, as in so many other stories of political deception and corruption, the best advice when unraveling the facts is to follow the money.
Senator Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, benefitted financially from his family’s ties to China. Here’s the rundown as published by the blog Echo Times:
According to the Los Angeles Times, in 1997 Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum, who invests his own and clients’ money into undervalued firms, expanded his business investments into the communist nation to the point that “his firm is now a prominent investor” there.
In 1992, the investments amounted to one project worth less than $500,000. Two years later he was planning to invest up to $150 million and two years after that a Blum investment firm paid $23 million for a stake in a Chinese government-owned steel company.
Another investment by Blum’s firm was helped by the International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank, which invested $10 million in the leading producers of soybean milk and candy in China.
Feinstein’s patronage of the Chinese communist government, her efforts to soft-pedal their human rights record and aid them in demeaning Taiwan, and her family’s fiscal gain from multi-million dollar dealings with Chinese businesses makes her claim of mortification that a Chinese spy could spend 20 years on staff suspect at best.
Finally, President Trump didn’t let Feinstein’s hiring of a Chinese spy pass without a tweet: “Dianne is the person leading our nation on ‘collusion’ with Russia (only done by Dems). Will she now investigate herself,” the president tweeted.
As of press time, lawmakers have not announced any impending investigation of Feinstein’s former staffer and her knowledge of his work for the Chinese communist government.
Photo: AP Images
