TOC Ready Room 23 March 2023: China, moles, and economic mischief (the non-TikTok kind)

There are always too many interesting new developments to try to cram very many of them into a single Ready Room.  This edition, like all the rest, will leave a number of promising nuggets on the cutting-room floor.

But here are a couple of standouts from this week’s haul so far.

“China mole” info from think-tank officer sheds light on DOJ stance on Bidens in 2019

Miranda Devine has a great piece at New York Post on Wednesday about the explosive information from a Washington, D.C. think-tank principal, Gal Luft, that in a period prior to early 2019, “Hunter Biden had an FBI mole named ‘One-Eye’ who tipped off his Chinese business partners that they were under investigation.”

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Iran’s navy: Stealth-stalking the planet

On 9 March 2023, a webcam caught Iranian frigate IRIS Dena (F-75) underway departing Rio de Janeiro at the end of an extended port visit that began on 26 February 2023.

Forward support base IRINS Makran (441) was presumably in company with Dena.  Although Iran’s leaders have threatened to send the two-ship flotilla through the Panama Canal on this “round the world” deployment, it has been a vexed question from the beginning where the ships are at a given time, and it isn’t clear if they’re headed for the canal now.

There is naturally speculation that the warships will stop in Venezuela next.  If they do, they could already be off the coast from Caracas given their departure from Rio on Thursday.

China goes down to the sea: Putting the “hybrid” in warfare (Bonus update: Biden’s excellent balloon* adventure)

Foreword:  In the interim before sending this to post, the Chinese surveillance balloon* swam into America’s ken.  (Since then, more unidentified airborne objects have been shot down in the last 48-odd hours.)  As an example of the intrusive level at which the Chinese Communist Party is prepared to admit itself to other nations, including the United States, the balloon could hardly have been more timely or useful.  The separate phenomenon recounted in this article has been pooh-poohed by some Western observers as a stretch, too exotic, or – somehow – “evidently” not close enough to implementation to worry about.  But there’s really no closer it has to be.  The capability exists; the opportunity is wide open right now.  Of course China didn’t develop the capability merely for the CCP’s amusement, with no intention of using it.  If Xi Jinping has major geopolitical moves in view, as he manifestly does, now is the time to make preparations for it.  That’s what the surveillance balloon was about:  not just a probe, but a measure to prepare a hybrid battlespace.  We should be paying attention to everything.  I’ll have a few comments on the balloon at the end.

U.S. bombers to Australia: New deployment, old issue

In 2016, I wrote about the recent purchase by a China-based company of a 99-year lease on parts of the port of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory.  The company, Landbridge, would execute the terms of the lease, which included port operations and a commercial fuel depot at a location close to where the U.S. Marines are deployed to Darwin, through an Australian subsidiary set up for the purpose.

Landbridge has connections to the Communist Party through its interactions with government officials in its homebase of Rizhao, a port city in Shandong Province.  The company’s owner, Ye Cheng, has also referred to Landbridge’s port lease in Darwin as Landbridge’s participation in Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative – certainly not evidence of detachment by the company from the Party.  One Belt, One Road is a government project, not the vision of Chinese “private” industry (to the extent there ever was such a thing, or still could be a year on from the Xi regime’s comprehensive 2021 business crackdown).

When the Landbridge deal was being negotiated,

TOC Ready Room 24 August 2022: Notes on the Boxes of Mar-a-Lago; the end of an old order continues

The big news from the last 48 hours is that the Biden White House actually did know in advance of the Mar-a-Lago raid, and in fact had been involved in the issue of the documents held at Mar-a-Lago since at least April of 2022 (and probably earlier).  So the original claim that the Biden White House didn’t know about it was false.

That point has been gone over vigorously since it came out Monday night.  But the latest information on the Mar-a-Lago/classified information dust-up also confirms my previous discussion of the classification issue (and here).

In addition to that discussion, I offer as preparation an excellent 7-odd minutes with Megyn Kelly and former CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright, which packages a pretty comprehensive overview of the things that matter.