Very Briefly Noted: China Zhou, FBI's MAL Raid

Mar 05, 2023

Very briefly …

Yesterday CTH cited a Reuters article that explains for new readers why I refer to the current occupant of the Oval Office as “Zhou”—which is the PinYin way to spell “Joe”. I’ll simply paste in the portion of the Reuters article that CTH quotes:

March 3 (Reuters) – The Biden administration approved 192 licenses worth over $23 billion to ship U.S. goods and technology to Chinese companies on a U.S. trade blacklist in the first quarter of last year, according to a document released by a U.S. congressional committee on Friday.
The 192 licenses granted were out of 242 license applications decided between January and March 2022, a chart showed, and 115 of those approved contained controlled technology. Nineteen, or 8 percent of the total number of applications, were denied, and 31 were returned without action.
Republican Representative Michael McCaul, chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, released the license numbers on Friday after revealing at a hearing on Tuesday that more than $23 billion worth of licenses were approved for suppliers to companies on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “entity list” in the first quarter of 2022.
In a statement on Friday, McCaul called the approvals unacceptable. “This critical U.S. technology is going to the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance and military efforts,” he said. (read more)

Next up, interesting details regarding FBI attempted pushback against the misuse of its agents to conduct the MAL Raid. TGP quotes the WaPo. As above, I’ll quote what TGP excerpts from the WaPo. Follow the link to TGP for discussion:

The Washington Post reported yesterday:

Months of disputes between Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents over how best to try to recover classified documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and residence led to a tense showdown near the end of July last year, according to four people familiar with the discussions.
Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.
Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.