FBI Is Escalating Its Anti-China McCarthyism

May 21, 2019 (EIRNS)—China is “luring U.S. intel vets to leak government secrets with cash,” the Washington Examiner hyped on May 17, a story based on one former intelligence official being sentenced to a 20-year jail term on charges of espionage for China and lying to the FBI. Three others facing similar charges signed plea agreements in the past year, it reported.

Whatever the merits of the individual cases cited, of which EIR is not informed, the message of the Examiner story is that in the view of the FBI, anyone or anything related to China is an enemy of the nation. The Examiner neglects to mention that the FBI’s anti-China war is run by the same networks that collaborated with British intelligence in attempting to effect a coup d’état against President Donald Trump.

The Washington Examiner quotes FBI Director Christopher Wray—who last year told Congress that a “whole of society” mobilization is urgent against China—now telling the Council on Foreign Relations last month that

“no country poses a broader, more severe intelligence-collection threat than China. They’re doing it through Chinese intelligence services, through state-owned enterprises, through ostensibly private companies, through graduate students and researchers, through a variety of actors all working on behalf of China.”

Former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap is also cited. He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last December that “China is the most severe counterintelligence threat facing the U.S. today. Every rock we turn over, every time we looked for it, it’s not only there, it’s worse than we anticipated.”

Priestap, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division from the end of 2015 to the end of 2018 and responsible for global counterintelligence, was up to his eyeballs in the Russiagate operation, in tight coordination with British intelligence, as Rep. Jim Jordan elicited from him during his closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in 2018, which was released in April.