The Mueller Investigation and the Chinese

Copies of the "Mueller Report" printed by the US Government Publishing Office are seen at the US Capitol in Washington, DC on April 24, 2019. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

From my perspective as a career CIA operations officer, the Mueller investigation is amazingly revealing in ways it was never intended to be.

The battle lines have long been drawn, with the left claiming impeachable offenses and President Donald Trump claiming a witch hunt.

Yet, the release of the Mueller report appears to strongly support Trump’s position, not only since Mueller determined that no “collusion” with the Russians took place, but because evidence suggests he and the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) leadership were aware of this fact at least 18 months before the investigation’s conclusion—but continued it anyway.

Occam’s razor indicates the most likely explanation for continuing a legal investigation where no legal justification exists was a political desire to do so: Mueller and FBI and DOJ leadership were philosophically opposed to Trump, just like the rest of the so-called “resist” or “resistance” movement.

Many here in the United States have argued that the resistance movement is not real, but there is direct evidence to the contrary. For example, in 2018 we saw a young woman named Reality Winner badly damage her life by purposely leaking a classified document to the press only because she believed it would damage Trump. She is still in jail serving a more than five-year sentence.

In March, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Ron Hansen was convicted of spying for the Chinese over a long period of time. His sentence will be handed down in September where he is expected to receive a relatively light sentence of 15 years in exchange for his cooperation with U.S. authorities.

His initial motivation for spying against the United States appears to have been money. During the investigation, however, a number of Hansen’s conversations were captured and transcribed, revealing that Hansen hated Trump, was deeply committed to the resist philosophy, and viewed working against Trump as his duty.

Hanson’s betrayal of the United States was discovered when he approached another DIA officer and pitched to him the idea of spying for the Chinese, as well. It appears that resisting the Trump presidency played a significant role in the pitch. Hansen seems to have argued in the pitch that, in addition to a large monetary payout from the Chinese, it was a good way to fight back and “resist” the current administration.

Having been directly involved many times in exactly these types of human intelligence recruitment operations, I can tell you that the pitching of another DIA officer was something that the Chinese intelligence service studied very closely and approved every aspect of long before it took place.

The implication here is conclusive and astounding: The Chinese intelligence service and the Chinese government leadership as a whole have one public window into the resistance movement, and that is the Mueller investigation. The Hansen pitch makes clear that the Chinese have concluded the resist movement inside our own government is something they can exploit for their own ends.

If the Chinese have concluded that the resistance movement is an opportunity for them, then likely so have the Russians, and probably other foreign adversaries, as well. And if our enemies have concluded the resistance movement is an opportunity for them, then anyone concerned about foreign interference in U.S. affairs would be naive at best to continue to claim it’s not a national security threat to us.

It’s long past time to add a question to the polygraph required to receive a top-secret clearance confirming that one’s personal political beliefs are not more important than protecting classified information.

Regardless, the Chinese have just told us all we need to know about the true motivations behind the Mueller investigation—and countless other leaks and roadblocks set up throughout the federal government to resist the duly elected president of the United States.

Brad Johnson is a retired CIA senior operations officer and a former chief of station. He is president of Americans for Intelligence Reform.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.