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August 7, 2018

Outrageous: Media shrug off Feinstein spy scandal story

By Thomas Lifson

Imagine for a minute if Representative Devin Nunes or Trey Gowdy or Matt Gaetz had employed a Russian spy for two decades.  Imagine further that this Republican solon were married to a spouse who had made a fortune investing in Russia.  Do you think such news would receive less than wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, MSNBC, or any of the other television news operations?

Yet, with very little media attention, the story has emerged that Senator Dianne Feinstein – of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, with access to the highest-level secrets – employed for two decades a spy who reported to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS).  When the news was first made public, buried paragraphs deep into a Politico story, hardly anyone noticed.

China, for example, is certainly out to steal U.S. technology secrets, noted former intelligence officials, but it also is heavily invested in traditional political intelligence gathering, influence and perception-management operations in California.  Former intelligence officials told me that 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[.] ...

According to four former intelligence officials, in the 2000s, a staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein's San Francisco field office was reporting back to [China's Ministry of State Security].  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.

Most of the media attention that mentioned the scandal did so to disparage President Trump for tweeting about it Friday night...

...and mentioning it at a rally in Ohio on Saturday:

I like Dianne Feinstein I have to tell you, but I don't like the fact that she had a Chinese spy driving her and she didn't know it.

Feinstein replied Friday on Twitter:

Michael Savage pointed out yesterday on his talk show that the FBI warned Feinstein of a spy on her staff but did not extend the same courtesy to candidate Donald Trump.  Instead, the FBI used a bogus dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump, not warn him.  A San Franciscan himself, Savage noted that the senator's husband has extensive business ties in China.

Peter Hasson of the Daily Caller writes that the person who fits the profile of the purported spy is longtime Feinstein staffer Russell Lowe:

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. ...

Since then, more details have emerged about the alleged spy, including that he worked for Feinstein for 20 years, "attended Chinese consulate functions for the senator" and was fired five years ago.

If Lowe is the spy, then a scandal was completely covered up for five years.  Let's see: who was in charge of the FBI then, allowing a Democrat senator to fire a spy who had spied for twenty years?  That's right: James Comey.

The rot is far deeper than we suspected.

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