Infiltrating Mar-a-Lago
Serious questions are being raised about security measures at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., after an Asian woman was arrested for attempting to access the private resort. Yujing Zhang, 32, reportedly was granted entry to the club on March 30 after telling a Secret Service agent that she was a club member there to use the pool.
Zhang later told club management she was there for a U.N. Chinese-American friendship event. Resort staff assumed she was related to a club member named Zhang and allowed a golf cart valet to drop her off at the main reception area. Fortunately, a sharp receptionist confirmed there was no U.N. event scheduled and Zhang wasn’t on any approved access lists.
When taken into custody, Zhang was carrying four cellphones, a laptop, an external hard drive and a USB thumb drive containing computer malware. During a subsequent interview with Secret Service, the woman claimed a Chinese friend told her to travel to the event from Shanghai and “try to speak with a member of the president’s family about Chinese and American foreign economic relations.”
Zhang is being charged with making a false statement to a federal officer and attempting to enter or remain in a restricted building or grounds ...
https://www.richmond.com/opinion/our-opinion/editorial-infiltrating-mar-a-lago/article_9aceccb1-6d8f-591d-bf03-adfb3ddc3109.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Charles Lee poses with Donald Trump in an undated photo./unfca.org
David Corn, Daniel Schulman and Dan Friedman
April 5, 2019 11:26 AM
... This week, the controversy took a true cloak-and-dagger turn when a federal court filing revealed that the Secret Service had arrested a Chinese woman named Yujing Zhang, who on March 30 had allegedly tried to enter Mar-a-Lago. Trump and his family were staying at the resort that weekend, and Zhang was carrying four cell phones, one laptop, an external hard drive, and a thumb drive allegedly containing malware. According to an affidavit filed by a Secret Service agent, Zhang, after first claiming she was at the club to go to the pool (she had no bathing suit), said that she had come to Mar-a-Lago to attend an event held by the “United Nations Chinese American Association” and that she had been sent there by a friend named Charles who had “told her to travel from Shanghai, China to Palm Beach, Florida to attend this event and attempt to speak with a member of the President’s family about Chinese and American foreign economic relations.”
This is where it gets interesting. An event had been scheduled at Mar-a-Lago that night that had been promoted by Li “Cindy” Yang, a massage parlor entrepreneur and Trump donor who, as Mother Jones disclosed, also ran a business called GY US Investments that offered Chinese clients opportunities to “interact with the president, the [American] Minister of Commerce and other political figures” at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere. (Yang founded the massage parlor where Robert Kraft, the Trump pal who owns the New England Patriots, was busted for allegedly soliciting prostitution; she sold this location to a new owner around 2013.) But the event at Mar-a-Lago that evening had been canceled after Mother Jones and the Miami Herald reported on Yang’s activities.
That Mother Jones reporting included a story noting that Yang was an officer of two groups with ties to China’s Communist Party and government: the Florida branch of the Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China (CPPRC) and the Miami chapter of the American arm of the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. The CPPRC, which calls for the absorption of Taiwan into China, has been described by China experts—including the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an organization created by Congress in 2000—as a vehicle for projecting Chinese influence in the West that is closely tied to the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which aims to use overseas Chinese to promote the party’s positions throughout the world. Last year, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported that China relies on the United Front to “co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party.” The panel noted that the United Front’s global influence campaigns are often hard to discern: “It is precisely the nature of United Front work to seek influence through connections that are difficult to publicly prove and to gain influence that is interwoven with sensitive issues such as ethnic, political, and national identity, making those who seek to identify the negative effects of such influence vulnerable to accusations of prejudice.” Testifying before Congress last year, Bill Priestap, who then headed the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said the United Front Work Department is “at the heart of <China’s> influence efforts” ...
Then the story got more curious. The Herald reported that Yang had a connection to an unusual Chinese fellow named Charles Lee, who ran a business bringing Chinese execs to the United States on travel packages that included visits to Mar-a-Lago for events Yang promoted on the GY US Investments website. As the Herald put it, Lee recruited “clients for…events advertised by Yang as opportunities to pay for face time with Donald Trump.” And Lee also ran a group called the United Nations Chinese Friendship Association—a name similar to the one cited by Zhang, the Mar-a-Lago intruder ...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/charles-lee-mystery-man-in-trumps-mar-a-lago-china-scandal-prompts-counterintelligence-concerns/
This is why! Chump is on the take from these people, and they're all paying for access. Chump doesn't want us to know who walks in the door at Maralago with barrels of cash. This has been going on since his inaugural, maybe longer.
The Secret Service knows who comes in there - or they should know. Why aren't they being subpoenaed to testify about this?
