We Need to Talk About Chinese Election Interference

What Russia was to our 2016 election, China will be in 2024 – and the time to get prepared is now because the counterintelligence clock is ticking

All eyes in America and much of the world were on a Manhattan courthouse this week.

I’m not talking about the Donald J. Trump one. I don’t have much to say about that, since my expertise is intelligence not the law. That said, it seems to me that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a politically motivated lightweight who cobbled together a decidedly weak case against his high-profile target which appears unlikely to result in conviction and may get thrown out altogether. Besides, Trump’s serious legal problems are building elsewhere, namely in Georgia and Washington, DC, relating to 2020 election shenanigans and mishandling of classified information (there’s no doubt about Trump’s guilt in the latter, but prosecution there is politically fraught). By the time the 2024 Republican primary race kicks off, the former president may well be facing several criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions, with New York’s being the least serious of them.

Therefore, dear reader, you will forgive me for not paying much attention on Tuesday when former President Trump was in a Manhattan court, getting arraigned, because I was watching events unfolding in the Federal court in Manhattan, which is located around the corner from where The Donald was, unironically at the edge of Chinatown. That’s where a prominent citizen of the People’s Republic of China, one Guo Wengui, attended his bail hearing. The 52-year-old Guo, whose legal name is Ho Wan Kwok, yet possesses a raft of aliases (in addition to Guo Wengui, AKA Miles Guo, AKA Miles Kwok, AKA Brother Seven, AKA The Principal, AKA Kin Ming Je, AKA William Je: those are the ones the Feds know about), wanted to get out of jail before his trial on the very serious charges the Department of Justice arrested him on last month, which boil down to an over $1 billion fraud scheme.

To cut to the chase, Guo failed. The court refused to grant bail to the accused since prosecutors made a convincing case that the shady international man of mystery, with his numerous passports from several countries, on top of the $394,000 in cash stashed in a safe in his mansion in New Jersey which Guo failed to disclose to the court, not to mention $100,000 worth of gold and foreign currency pus $35 million in bank accounts in the U.S., Britain, Switzerland and maybe Kazakhstan, represented a serious flight risk. Judges don’t appreciate those games, therefore Guo’s not going anywhere.

The peculiar Guo saga, which has been covered at Top Secret Umbra, is so strange as to be scarcely believable, yet it’s played out on social media for all to see. Somehow Guo managed to become best friends with Steve Bannon, the quixotic right-wing gadfly who served as President Trump’s “chief strategist” for the first eight months of the Trump presidency, with the two plotting together to somehow liberate China from the Communists, from the safety of New York. None of this has ever made much sense, yet it’s clear that the relationship between Bannon and Guo, personally and professionally, has grown close (Bannon was living on Guo’s $37 million yacht, the one DoJ says was purchased with stolen funds, when he was arrested by the Feds in August 2020). Neither are Guo’s connections to Trump World limited to the Bannon axis. GETTR, the MAGA-friendly social media platform founded a few months after Trump left the White House and led by Jason Miller, the onetime Trump aide known for allegations of impregnating mistresses and poisoning strippers, in fact has been funded and run by Guo since its birth. When Guo and Bannon team up, weirdness invariably follows. Most recently come reports that the twosome plans to sell “unvaccinated sperm and eggs” from donors via GETTR.