Trump's Shady Chinese Links: Bannon, Navarro, et al.

[Chip]

Bombshell piece in The New Yorker, 24 Oct. Too long for a C & P, so I'll hope the link doesn't end up at a paywall. Well worth the price of a copy at a newsstand (if they still exist).

How a Tycoon Linked to Chinese Intelligence Became a Darling of Trump Republicans

Guo Wengui has been trailed by scandals involving corruption and espionage. What is he really after?

by Evan Osnos

(this is a brief excerpt)

Donald Trump became the Republican Presidential front-runner that summer, and Guo’s instincts proved well suited to the emerging era; he had already joined Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, and he wasn’t shy about praising his own business acumen (“I’m a genius at making money!”). He boasted of expensive tastes: handmade Louis Vuitton shoes, a rare variety of tea that he reportedly declared was worth a million dollars a kilo. Even before he was introduced to Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon had heard enough about Guo to pronounce him “the Donald Trump of Beijing.” (Years later, when federal agents went looking for Bannon in connection with an allegedly fraudulent scheme to raise money for a wall on the Mexican border, they found him aboard Guo’s yacht, in Long Island Sound.)

At the Sherry, though, Guo rapidly developed a reputation for peculiar habits. He seemed obsessed with the risk of intruders; he tried to block the fire exit in his penthouse, and residents complained that he stationed bodyguards in the lobby. In March, 2015, a spate of reports in the Chinese press offered an explanation for his anxiety: Guo—whom the reports referred to by his Mandarin name, Guo Wengui—was at the center of a burgeoning scandal involving corruption and espionage.

For nearly a decade, he had maintained a secret partnership with one of China’s most powerful spymasters, an intelligence officer named Ma Jian, who had recently been arrested by his own government. Caixin, a Chinese investigative news organization, reported that Ma and Guo had used surveillance, blackmail, and political influence to amass fortunes and evade scrutiny.

Guo denied any wrongdoing; he told a Hong Kong newspaper that he and Ma were just friends, who had met through work and bonded over a shared appreciation for architecture. But, two years later, he changed his story dramatically. He acknowledged that he had been a longtime “affiliate” of China’s all-pervasive Ministry of State Security. The agency, he said, had tasked him with “handling things for them” and connecting with “sensitive figures” abroad, travelling on eleven different passports and employing the code name Wu Nan.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...mp-republicans

[Chuck Naill]

I listened to Terry Gross interview Mr. Osnos last week. For me, just another reason Donald Trump should never be allowed to ever hold any public office. David Brooks noted when Trump won the election that the "stain of Trump" would be with us for a long time.

[TSherbs]

My guess (not expert) is that several foreign intelligence ("spy") agencies were encouraged with the prospect of being able to work their way into the graces of the coterie of clowns around Trump.