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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.
I find the timing of this alongside the Russia Today fake indictments of Russians who will never face a real trial to be suspicious. The DOJ has lost its presumption of objectivity, and it really feels like they are trying to say, "pay no attention to the fact that the DNC of our second largest state was severely compromised by the PRC. A few right leaning youtubers got paid a few million dollars by a media company secretly financed by Russia!"
I'm curious to see how this plays out.
As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers
I know nothing about the guy, what's his deal?
It's a long story but basically: street journalist millennial covers Occupy Wall Street, gets into the burgeoning journo outlets of the era (Vice when they were hot shit) doing real investigative journalism, leaves them exactly as they go woke because he can see the writing on the wall, plays the youtube game hard (and I do mean hard, the guy used to publish news videos every day essentially by himself) at the right time. Makes a ton of money by catering to disaffected liberals, libertarians and other people thrown out of the left wing that aren't straight unadulterated MAGA and ends up at the head of his own small media empire, which includes his own news website and a couple of podcasts.
It's surprisingly not that uncommon a route, in retrospect I can think of two other guys who fit the bill. But Tim's special sauce is that he's a shrewd businessman from the school of hard knocks. He's got the most boring inoffensive content relative to how political commentators usually are but he knows how to position and market it very well.
This makes this particular thing a bit surprising because if there's anyone I would expect to properly vet funding sources it's him. He's been cultivating his reputation over the years to appeal to a particular demographic and he had some run ins with shady people in the past (who can forget the Jack Murphy drama?).
You can see him in this tweet executing a very competent defense in my opinion, but someone in his org fucked up, this is going to do permanent damage to his brand.
As for whether he's bought and paid for, I doubt it. Tim isn't the sort of person you can buy with money. You can fund him because he's useful for you to be around and you can nudge him towards particular things because he will follow algorithmic trends and rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and propaganda, but the guy that sacrificed his entire career to build his own thing for independence's sake isn't going to so directly sell out.
I used to like his street journalist content a long time ago, but he turned into the single worst thing you find on Youtube outside of Elsa/Spiderman content: "read alongs" w/ commentary on news articles. Louis Rossman also turned to the same, to my chagrin. I imagine it's a steady source of easy and cheap content that can be churned out daily, but my god does it feel dumb and insulting to me. It reminds me of school and reading along a text with the teacher.
The sirens of slop are hard to resist. He got from living in a van to owning a compound out of it, so while I do find the click bait titles cringe and his commentary and guests mediocre, it's easy to understand why he did it. You can't really fight the algorithm if you want to make money.
I do miss the old YouTube free for all where people tried the wildest things just to see what sticks.
Remember that one girl that did reply videos to every single popular thing with barely any other content than her cleavage in the thumbnail? People look dumber playing NPCs on TikTok but the game was rigged from the start.
The reply girls are arguably a big part of the reason why modern YouTube isn't what it used to be--the company changed the algorithm to punish reply girls, but it also punished non-garbage content in the process.
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I don't exactly respect Tim Pool's political commentary, but I respect him a lot as a person and take this as a demonstration of how easy it is to be caught up in accusations of foreign influence, spying, etc.
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Yeah, I know nothing about him. I'm just surprised to see an apology so fast, when anyone familiar with the dynamics here knows that denial is typically the dominant strategy.
I don't think "You can eat my Irish ass" is really an apology.
I guess apology might not be the correct term, but he's not denying that it happened, merely that it influenced him in any way. Nowhere in there does he actually deny that it happened, he throws his handlers under the bus.
So yes, he's an edgy boy using naughty language against journalists. But he starts by basically admitting the allegations before backtracking to say that they're just allegations. He doesn't defend against them or deny or go on the attack.
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