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  • 2018-09-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Senator Dianne Feinstein Employ a Chinese Spy? (de)
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  • On 27 July 2018, as part of a broader story about foreign espionage in Silicon Valley, Politico reported that a member of California senator Dianne Feinstein’s staff had been recruited by Chinese intelligence five years earlier and that this staffer reported back to China about local politics. The article cited former intelligence officials in noting that: The revelation was significant in part because Feinstein was chair of the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the staff member in question served as Feinstein’s driver and gofer in her Bay Area office and was a liaison to the local Asian-American community: On 6 August 2018, Feinstein issued a statement on the matter, saying that several years earlier she had been informed by the FBI about the possible recruitment efforts targeting one of her staff and had removed the individual when she learned the details: Some partisan news outlets such as Fox News, as well as President Trump himself, gave the controversy oxygen by suggesting that the mainstream media’s lack of interest in the story exposed a partisan double standard in terms of how foreign meddling in political affairs is handled both by the media and by law enforcement. That argument holds that instead of providing Feinstein with a defensive briefing about the matter, the FBI should have opened an investigation into Feinstein, comparable to a current investigation involving President Trump and his campaign’s potential contacts with Russian operatives: It is difficult to address the merits of this kind of argument based on what is publicly known about the case. The FBI has not commented on it, and according to Feinstein, no risk of the staff member in question's transferring sensitive material ever existed, as no one on the senator's California staff possessed security clearances necessary to have access to that kind of information in the first place. While the reporting on this topic vaguely suggested that the staff member reported back to China about local politics, it is uncertain whether this staff member ever provided the Chinese anything of value, or even whether efforts to recruit this individual were even successful: (en)
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