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Notes -
Chinese Asset in NY State Government
Linda Sun was born in China, moved to the US with her parents at the age of five, and later became a US citizen. She rose up to become the Deputy Chief of Staff for the governor. I know plenty of folks who maintain dual citizenship with other countries, but I don't know how serious the USG was/is about making Chinese nationals "really" renounce their Chinese citizenship in order to become US citizens, nor do I have any idea if Sun did/did not.
She was a subject of interest starting in at least 2020, when she was interviewed by the FBI about her trip to China. While not knowing whether she's categorized a dual citizen (which I do know, for many purposes, the security apparatus of the USG treats as synonymous with "foreign national" for many purposes) or simply a former Chinese citizen with Chinese heritage, I also don't know what the state of these sorts of FBI inquiries are. Have they become a more routine/random matter, where they just occasionally drag some folks in this category in to question them and see if anything comes up? Or did they already have some reason to be suspicious of her in 2020? Her recent indictment acting as a foreign agent, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy includes events going back to 2015 (quite a few in the 2018-2019 years), but it's not clear at what point the FBI or anyone else became aware of any of them or to what extent they motivated the 2020 interview. NYT describes it as "questions were repeatedly raised".
This took years and a significant quantity of behavior bubbling up to get to the point where she was finally fired (March 2023). I can't currently find any details of the firing, but the NY governor's press secretary said that she was fired for "misconduct". Another year and a half, and we got an indictment. This may all be a very plausible timeline for how these sorts of things generally go.
So. Paul Manafort. He joined Donald Trump's campaign in March 2016 (when they were likely scrambling to get any sort of organization going), was promoted to campaign manager three months later in June, then fired two months after that in August, essentially immediately after Trump received his first security briefing.
To this day, there are still people (some even in TheMotte) who think that Paul Manafort is the smoking gun of Trump's culpability with Russia. That Trump obviously must be guilty for having that guy on his campaign. That it proves that "Trump's campaign" was working with Russia, and that it's Trump's personal fault.
On the other side, I personally believe that Paul Manafort and his Russian collaborators made a victim out of Donald Trump, and I can remain perfectly consistent in saying that I think that Linda Sun and her Chinese collaborators made a victim out of the NYS governments that employed her.
I think someone could make a plausible argument that both Trump and specific folks in the NYS gov't were culpable, though I probably would be pretty skeptical; as I said, I think the timeline in the Sun case is plausibly fine. But I would need an absolutely phenominal argument to support the proposition that Trump was personally culpable for Manafort, but that individuals in the NYS government were not culpable for Sun... otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.
There are no US/China dual citizens. China (like Japan, India, Singapore) doesn't recognize dual citizenship.
Also, is it just me, or do a lot of the individual items under Summary of Criminal Conduct in the indictment (items 9 to 15) come across as nothingburgers? Blocking a meeting? Getting the governor to post a thank you tweet for donated respirators? These are things a politician's chief of staff does, & it's not like she did it in secret and gave no reasons why it's not in the interest of the governor to e.g. have those meetings. And the "visa fraud" is ... so they can get a letter of invitation so some Chinese government officials can visit NY to talk business?
Also:
Are "blocked Taiwanese officials from having access to the governor’s office" and "quashed meetings with Taiwanese officials" not the same thing in different words? Why list the same item twice?
What does "millions of dollars in transactions" mean? Is it a million dollar bribe? Or is it that the China based business did million dollar worth of business transactions with customers?
Are "travel benefits" and "tickets to events" not perfectly normal things to for one government to give another government's representatives in the normal course of business?
If you read the entire indictment, it looks like there was a sort of quid pro quo going on. Sun's husband met with Chinese government officials who facilitated his business exporting seafood from the United States to China. They earned millions of dollars from this business, which they didn't report on tax forms and laundered into the United States through purchases of real estate and luxury cars. There were also a series of lower-level gifts like covering travel to China and giving them event tickets. In return, she was basically doing the Chinese government's bidding to the extent that her position allowed. She was regularly meeting with Chinese officials and keeping them abreast of her actions.
That's certainly a defense. But, "My actions were totally in the interest of New York State and had nothing to do with the millions of dollars my husband's business earned after meeting with Chinese government officials or the thousands of dollars of gifts and travel compensation I got and didn't include on my ethics report" may not play particularly well with a jury.
I agree that if there really exists an financial arrangement whereby money is exchanged for political favor, then that completely changes the nature of her actions. However, the way it's presented in media and in the indictment is as if those actions on her part (such as blocking the meeting) constitute illegal activities in and of themselves, as if she can be convicted for simply being politically chummy with the Chinese, with or without the alleged kickbacks.
The listing of "travel benefits", "tickets to events" and "salted ducks" as instances of kickback is particularly odd. It makes you wonder why they felt the need to appeal to such ambiguious evidence if they had actually solid evidence proving the financial quid pro quo.
That's how indictments (and civil complaints) work. They list a bunch of facts and then allege that the fact pattern means that the person broke the law (or committed a civil wrong). They don't have to include every detail or spell out every implication. They aren't the last word in the evidence that's going to be presented at trial, either. All that's necessary is that they state enough facts that a jury can make a reasonable inference that the alleged acts were violated, and they've done that.
Lol, you're obviously younger than me. Before they cracked down on that sort of thing, event tickets was one of the biggest kickback schemes around. Why do you think corporate luxury boxes became so popular? When I was a kid if there was anything I wanted to go to there was always a chance my uncle (who was a facilities manager for a downtown skyscraper) could get them from a vendor. When I was in high school my friend's dad was in sales and he bought like a dozen tickets to every show at a local concert venue to give to customers. There were always a few shows a year no one wanted tickets to so a whole bunch of us would go. The ethics people started cracking down on that so the new thing became trips. If a vendor wanted to make sales he'd invite his customers to, say, an all-expenses paid hunting trip at a ranch in Wyoming. Ostensibly to talk business. This was soon cracked-down on and most companies started limiting their purchasing agents to gifts under $100, which has been steadily revised downward to the point where anything more than a fruit basket is prohibited. For a while, there was still and old school of purchasing agents who pretty much wouldn't do business with anyone who didn't give kickbacks, and were kind of flummoxed when the new generation of vendors didn't have anything to offer because 90% of their customer base wasn't allowed to accept anything, and the new generation of purchasing agents never knew of a world where that was even conceivable. This wasn't really that long ago (within the past 20 years), so it's understandable that stuff like this is still considered a red flag.
Kind of a shame really, because it's not as though genuine corruption dries up and goes away forever. You can't bribe politicians, but you can hire their children, or donate to their foundations. Maybe someone can make a case that cracking down on gifts is good -- cracking down on explicit bribes is good. But any culture that facilitates gift-giving is personal and human and doing something more than just facilitating efficient market transactions.
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