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High-level Chinese Defection Rumored
Chinese State Security Vice Minister Dong Jingwei would be highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic.
https://www.spytalk.co/p/high-level-chinese-defection-rumored
Excerpt:
Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei (董经纬) defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.
Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden Administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Spy Catcher
Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.
Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official who defected after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a tweet on Wednesday, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.
...Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst with The Soufan Group, who earned a master’s degree in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, also urged caution, saying unconfirmed reports of defections surface regularly. And more: “While significant and certainly useful for our intelligence efforts,” she added, “one high-level defection will not drastically change our understanding or approach to China. In short, if true, this is potentially significant but not a game-changer.”...
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Interesting times if true.
Democratic Strategist Linked to Early Push on Controversial Election Grants
The revelation is likely the first direct link, discovered in Pennsylvania.
https://broadandliberty.com/2021/06/14/democratic-strategist-tied-to-election-grants/
Excerpt:
An email introducing a Delaware County councilwoman to the idea of election grants from a nonprofit also cc’d a political strategist whose online bio boasts that he led “the soft-side effort to win the swing state [Pennsylvania] in 2020” for Democrats and their causes.
The revelation is likely the first direct link in Pennsylvania between grants from the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life for the 2020 election and a source with an open partisan affiliation for Democrats.
The email was obtained by Republican activist Leah Hoopes from Delaware County via a Right to Know request filed in February.
The email thread began on July 24 of last year when someone named Gwen Camp emailed Delaware County Councilwoman Christine Reuther. Although requests for comment to Camp were not returned, she is most likely a former Obama administration FEMA staffer as well as a former staffer for Sen. Bob Casey, according to a LinkedIn bio with that name.
Also cc’d on the email was Kevin Mack, whose email address identified him as employed with Deliver Strategies.
“Kevin Mack is a veteran political, communications and direct mail strategist,” his bio on the Deliver Strategies website says. “Mack most recently served as Lead Strategist for The Voter Project in Pennsylvania which was instrumental in signing up over 3.2 million people to vote by mail and leading the soft-side effort to win the swing state in 2020. Prior to that, Mack ran the Need to Impeach Campaign which built a grassroots movement of over 8.4 million Americans across all 50 states.”
The website’s homepage boasts that Deliver Strategies has worked for campaigns ranging from President Obama to Governor Wolf, and Congresswoman Susan Wild—all Democrats.