I assumed it was a mistake when I first read it.
But Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey is correct: The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post haven’t published a single word yet about the spy China had for more than a decade in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s California office.
Morrissey checked the Times’ website and found nothing. He also checked the Post’s and the L.A. Times’: nothing.
I did a separate search and came up with the same results: nothing.
You know what I did find plenty of on these websites, though? Stories about President Trump and Russian “collusion.”
“Colbert Jabs Trump for Saying, ‘Collusion Is Not a Crime,’” the New York Times reported on Aug. 1.
The Post published an op-ed that same day titled, “Trump says collusion isn’t a crime. He’s right. It’s actually many crimes.”
“It doesn’t matter if collusion is a crime. All that matters is how the House reacts,” the L.A. Times said separately in an op-ed of its own.
It goes on and on like that for quite some time.
That the nation’s largest newspapers have zero apparent interest in a story about the sustained foreign infiltration of a top-ranking senator’s office is remarkable. That they apparently see little news value in the fact that the spy worked for Feinstein when she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee is equally astounding.
[Also read: Devin Nunes rips FBI for treating Trump campaign probe ‘drastically’ different from alleged Feinstein spy situation]
It’s not like this is some small-potatoes story!
Politico, which first shed light on the issue on July 27, reported that the 20-year staffer was entrusted with a lot more than just menial office work.
As well as being Feinstein’s driver, the former staffer was also “a liaison to the local Chinese community,” the report noted, adding that the spy, who reportedly never held a security clearance, “was ‘run’ by officials based at China’s San Francisco Consulate.”
The New York Post’s Paul Sperry reported also that the staffer “even attended consulate functions for the senator.”
There’s more: “In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.”
In the years since that June meeting, Feinstein has lobbied hard on behalf of China, including in 1999 when she fought to get it into the World Trade Organization. Assume from that what you will.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports the spy “was fired a few years back” after his connections to the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security were discovered.
“[T]he FBI showed up at Feinstein’s office in Washington, D.C., about five years ago to alert the then-chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that her driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing “a local source.”
As Morrissey noted, certain newsrooms’ apparent disinterest in what is by all appearances a serious story is itself becoming a story.
