While the mainstream media is still busy lamenting over "Russia!" and breathlessly waiting for the next dreaded "Trump tweet," what they haven't spent much time on is a recent arrest and charging of a former State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, who possessed Top Secret security clearance and provided diplomatic and economic information to Chinese foreign intelligence agents in exchange for gifts and bribes. She then proceeded to "obstruct" the investigation into said illegal actions, and was arrested and charged for that obstruction on March 28, 2017.
According to the affidavit in support of the complaint and arrest warrant, which was unsealed today, Claiborne began working as an Office Management Specialist for the Department of State in 1999. She has served overseas at a number of posts, including embassies and consulates in Baghdad, Iraq, Khartoum, Sudan, and Beijing and Shanghai, China. As a condition of her employment, Claiborne maintains a Top Secret security clearance. Claiborne also is required to report any contacts with persons suspected of affiliation with a foreign intelligence agency.
Despite such a requirement, the affidavit alleges, Claiborne failed to report repeated contacts with two intelligence agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), even though these agents provided tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits to Claiborne and her family over five years. According to the affidavit, the gifts and benefits included cash wired to Claiborne’s USAA account, an Apple iPhone and laptop computer, Chinese New Year’s gifts, meals, international travel and vacations, tuition at a Chinese fashion school, a fully furnished apartment, and a monthly stipend. Some of these gifts and benefits were provided directly to Claiborne, the affidavit alleges, while others were provided through a co-conspirator.
According to the affidavit, Claiborne noted in her journal that she could “Generate 20k in 1 year” working with one of the PRC agents, who, shortly after wiring $2,480 to Claiborne, tasked her with providing internal U.S. Government analyses on a U.S.-Sino Strategic Economic Dialogue that had just concluded.
Claiborne, who allegedly confided to a co-conspirator that the PRC agents were “spies,” willfully misled State Department background investigators and FBI investigators about her contacts with those agents, the affidavit states. After the State Department and FBI investigators contacted her, Claiborne also instructed her co-conspirators to delete evidence connecting her to the PRC agents, the affidavit alleges.
The entire 59 page complaint can be found at SCRBD and is embedded at the bottom of this article.
DRAINING THE SWAMP
I have seen much hand-wringing across the Internet by Trump supporters as he chose cabinet members and advisors, with much discussion on who he chose for this position or that position, claiming his pledge to "drain the swamp" was being broken by bringing in members of the community that were "wealthy" or "lobbyists" or "big business" or what-ever some might consider as part of the swamp, but as a non-political figure, many us believed that Trump's references to the "swamp" during his campaign mean "corrupt" individuals inside Washington and this falls directly in line with what we have noted previously.
One by one, those "swamp monsters" are being drained.
WHY AREN'T THE MSM ALL OVER THIS?
So why the limited reporting on this in some news organizations before they rush off to file their next report on something "Russia" related, rather than delving into exactly what type of information Claiborne had shared with the Chinese? How much damage it did or did not do? Who her unnamed co-conspirator was?
The answers are easy.
Number 1: The dates of the crimes started in 2011, while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
"With all this talk of Russians allegedly interfering in U.S. elections, it is worth recalling that it wasn’t too long ago that the previous Democrat in the White House betrayed America by working hand in hand with our Communist enemies in mainland China.
As president, Bill Clinton essentially wiped out any strategic advantage the U.S. had by selling advanced U.S. missile technology to our enemy, the People’s Republic of China."
Number 2: The dates of the obstruction, according to the complaint, was 10/1/2014 - 8/24/2016, under the Obama administration.
Number 3: It doesn't fit into the "Russia" narrative the MSM wants to focus on.
Does anyone doubt that if this was the year 2018 or 2019 and someone in the State Department under the Trump administration with Top Secret clearance was caught selling information to any foreign entity, it would be headline news for weeks or months, with every other story from all the establishment media addressing one manufactured angle after another?
So where are they on this?
RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!
There are too busy twisting themselves into pretzels in an attempt to keep the "Russia collusion" story alive while at the same time trying to avoid the fact that more and more information is being revealed that someone high up in the Obama administration illegally "unmasked" the names of American citizens, then deliberately disseminated it throughout the intelligence community.
NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers told the House Intelligence Committee in an open hearing this month that 20 people in his agency have the authority to unmask U.S. names in FISA collection reports. "We use two criteria: the need to know on the person requesting us in the execution of their official duties, and the second part was, is the identification necessary to truly understand the context of the intelligence value that the report is designed to generate?" he said.
Housley said that the collection led to "other surveillance which led to multiple names being unmasked."
"This had nothing to do with Russia, I'm told or foreign intelligence of any kind," Housley said. Nunes confirmed when originally discussing the documents that they were not connected to the Russia investigation.
"The main concern here is not only the unmasking of the names, but the spreading of names for political purposes that had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with hurting and embarrassing the Trump transition and his team," Housley said.
Is it a coincidence that after months of the liberal media going on, ad nauseam, about Russia and the 2016 election, it took just one series of rapid tweets from Trump to turn the story to Americans being "unmasked" by intelligence officials?
