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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!"
Frankly, one interpretation of this whole affair is that Lauren Chen and her husband were scamming the Russians, because the Russians don't seem to have got anything they wanted out of this. They paid a lot for very little. Still, it would be a foolish thing for Chen to do.
These influencers are mostly just regular conservative culture warriors, and half of them are only reluctantly voting Trump. They're not especially pro-Russia, although they're not especially keen on the US's role in the conflict either. They mostly don't talk about it. Matt Christiansen, in particular, strikes me as a relatively fair-minded and moderately conservative libertarian type--no rabble-rouser by any means. The views these people express seem relatively normal among online right-wingers, the kind of people and views which are being systemically excluded from mainstream channels and outlets. While I don't expect it to be part of Russia's intent, I am reminded of how Western governments have in the past funded outside or underground media organizations to counter state-controlled media in foreign dictatorships.
I wonder if the reason the Russians targeted these influencers is because they actually believed the left-wing claims about all the right-wing grifters being pro-Russian, and so they decided to capitalize on that by actually funding them. They then discovered that the influencers weren't really all that pro-Russian at all, and then they felt like they had been cheated (and maybe they were?). However, the whole funding scheme is then exposed, and it has now seemingly confirmed the original left-wing claims that these right-wing influencers were all just pro-Russian grifters. Ironies abound.
Of course, if it was more like a scam to take Russian money but then just do whatever, then it has now backfired quite badly on them.
I think this is pretty common in intelligence work, the CIA routinely pays huge sums to large numbers of people who provide shitty, fake or useless information in the hope that some day, one of them might be in a position to hear something or accidentally find themselves in a useful role. It was the same in the Cold War (on all sides).
A few billion a year on human intelligence that is 99% useless is chump change.
I guess $10 million sounds like a lot, but it's not really in this context, especially if they were spending $100,000-$400,000 per month on multiple influencers for a handful of hours content that didn't really include anything in the way of Kremlin propaganda. It sounds like the Russian agents were none too happy with how things were going. Is that because Chen was just bad at her job or did she just not care? Of course, it gave those agents blackmail power over Chen and perhaps others, but what good is that? These are quite marginalized figures who have little or no instituational knowledge or pull to do anything for Russia. It all seems so absurd. But you're right, governments piss away money like this all the time.
Of course, I presume there are similar shenanigans going on elsewhere, but the DoJ likely has less interest in exposing them. These influencers are politically safe targets, but that just makes the Russians even more incompetent.
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