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China Spying In NY Leads to Indictments So Inner City Press Gets EDNY Answer All 3 Bailed As UN Silent

By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - ESPN

SDNY / UN GATE, March 16 – The day after the SDNY prosecution of Zhongsan Lui for illegal recruitment in the US was covered by Inner City Press (and the involved UN refused to answer Press questions on it), from EDNY this:

"Two complaints were unsealed and one amended complaint was authorized today in federal court in Brooklyn charging five defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the secret police of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to stalk, harass, and spy on Chinese nationals residing in Queens, New York and elsewhere in the United States...  Fan “Frank” Liu and Matthew Ziburis were arrested yesterday, while Shujun Wang was arrested this morning. All three arrests occurred in the Eastern District of New York. The defendants’ initial appearances are scheduled this afternoon in Brooklyn before United States Magistrate Judge James R. Cho." (Inner City Press will cover that)

  Just after 3 pm, Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, held a telephone press conference, to his credit, and took four questions. Inner City Press asked about the role of the UN and China's Mission to the UN, noting the NYPD Angwang case and the recent persona non grata removal of a UN staff member for working for Russia. The answer, for now, was that China's intimidation is growing wider.

Inner City Press live tweeted the presentments in which all three were bailed, thread here:

OK - now in EDNY, presentment of defendant Fan “Frank” Liu, charged with interstate harassment, operating as agent of China without FARA notification, etc Liu's lawyer: I think we have arrived at something close to an agreement on bond. [Lui will be released -- note that NYPD Angwang wasn't, at first - now he's out]. Judge James R. Cho: What's the proposed bail package?

AUSA: We are close.

 AUSA: One million bond with attachment of Mr. Liu's two properties, one in Jericho NY and the other in Florida. Electronic monitoring with a curfew. Cannot to go PRC consultate [UN Mission of China on 35th Street]. US wants $100,000 case. Lui says 25K

 AUSA: We're stuck at $50,000. The defendant has $3 million in funds related to this case have been transferred into his and his wife's account. He was an agent of the PRC. He's had extensive contacts with the PRC consulate.

 Lui's lawyer: The US is only alleging payments of $1500 to a private investigator for public record. There's the destruction of a work of art by a "not particularly famous Chinese artist." Frank Liu has Edgar Frankbonner from the firm of Goldberger & Dubin.

Frankbonner: Until recently he had a second home in Queens. $50,000 bail is an "extortionary sum." He's not a flight risk. This is not a crime of violence. I understand the insinuations. It's unsavory, sure. But he he turns in his passport, no flight risk.

 Frankbonner: $25,000 would not put them in the poor house. $50,000 would. It's unusual to wait until the bond is perfected to release the person. [Note: It is not unusual, at least in SDNY]

AUSA: Mr. Lui traveled to China three years ago. All he needs to go is go to the PRC Consulate in Manhattan. And he's gone. This entire case is about his connections to the PRC and what he is doing for them here in the US

 James James R. Cho: I'm setting bail at $30,000 and he does not have to wait to perfect the bond.  AUSA: Until properties attached, home imprisonment?

Defense: We object.Defense: It only takes a few days to attach the properties. He's a working person and needs to go about his life. James James R. Cho: Home incarceration until Friday. Is the suretor here? Have her stand by the podium. Lui's wife comes forward.

 Lui's wife states their address, which Inner City Press is not publishing here. Judge: I am approving bail today. Thread(s) will continue - and story later.

OK - Now US pushing for electronic monitoring of Shujun Wang - Federal Defenders opposing it Inner City Press @innercitypress · 43m Judge: I am prepared to sign the bond. Mr. Wang, you will be released. We are adjourned.

 But wait - there's more! Now at 6:38 pm the presentment of Lui's and Wang's co-defendant Matthew Ziburis with taxpayer funded lawyer Tony Ricco. Judge: You are charged with violating FARA and with harassing inter-state and ID theft.

US is agreeing to pre-trial release on $500,000 bond signed by girlfriend and mother who owns a house in Ohio, and $15,000 cash, all to be done by Friday until which time, electronic monitoring.  Counsel: Fine.

 Ziburis’ girlfriend is a teacher, she says.  They call his mother in Ohio, who says "What is this?" "Judge Cho from New York. How are you?" "Upset! I don't understand this!"

Judge Cho reads an address, and asks Ziburis’ mother, Do you live there? "No, that's his father." Judge: And you don't live there? A: I don't. [She gives another address that we will not publish.] She's on Social Security.

 Ziburis’ mother: What did he do? Judge: I don't think I need to summarize that right now. Good bye. [Dial tone.] Now AUSA contests Ziburis' eligibility for appointed counsel, says "may revisit it."

  We'll have more on this - and on the Zhongsan Lui trial.

The UN - more than a dozen spokespeople and officials - got this question from Inner City Press, before the EDNY press conference: "Press request on deadline for comment and action if any of SG Guterres on March 16 unsealing in federal court in Brooklyn of indictments / complaints charging five defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the secret police of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to stalk, harass, and spy on Chinese nationals residing in Queens, New York and elsewhere in the United States. All of the defendants allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes to target U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC." What is the role of China's Mission to the UN - and of the UN itself? On deadline."

No answer at all.

   Hours before the Beijing Winter Olympics a/k/a the Genocide Games kicked off, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres was there, issuing a canned video and equally canned read-out with the IOC's Thomas Bach. It was shameful.

 On February 18, before the end of the Games, a book is published: "Genocide Games of Guterres, In A Stormy Time: Silent on Uighurs Mass Incarcerated in Xinjiang, UN Is Complicit & Bans Press Which Covers DDC & Jho Low," here.

  Just after the Genocide Games - not during - Nils van der Poel of Sweden, who won two speedskating gold medals said: "The Olympics is a lot, it’s a fantastic sporting event where you unite the world and nations meet. But so did Hitler before invading Poland (Berlin hosted the 1936 Summer Games), and so did Russia before invading Ukraine [the first time?].   "I think it is extremely irresponsible to give it to a country that violates human rights as blatantly as the Chinese regime is doing." He added, tellingly, "I really think it’s terrible, but I think I shouldn’t say too much about it, because we still have a squad in China." What a travesty.

  This comes after even Foreign Affairs has said, albeit behind a paywall, "as if he’d somehow wandered into the wrong party, there was UN Secretary-General General António Guterres, who has distinguished himself with his silence on China’s human rights abuses.”

So why do people put up with Guterres? Inner City Press on January 24 in writing asked Guterres' spokespeople Stephane Dujarric and Melissa Fleming: "On SG Guterres' attendance at the upcoming Beijing Winter Genocide Olympics a/k/a Genocide Games, please immediately confirm knowledge by the UN of, and SG Guterres' response to, this letter." Nothing - no answer. Feb 19 song here


For China, Antonerio Guterres ensures too that no journalist from Taiwan or any Taiwan based media can even come into the UN, as Inner City Press can't. And where is the US Mission and State Department? They have been asked, by a major law firm pro bono. Watch this site.

On February 2 US Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon)  said, "It’s shameful for António Guterres to appear at the games. The U.N. has basically failed human rights."

 He may not know the half of it.

 Dujarric bragged that Guterres would  go "to Korea and then taking a plane to Beijing and then flying out commercially out of Beijing."

  So the plane to Beijing is not commercial. A CCP private jet like UN briber Ng Lap Seng, or Patrick Ho? During the Genocide Games, Guterres will be "in the [closed] loop" and will, Dujarric said, meet with Xi Jin Ping.

   The UN did not exist in 1936 but it seems clear that Guterres would have attended the Nazi Olympics, too. At least if they, like China through the China Energy Fund Committee, flashed cash at one of Guterres' undisclosed funders, the Gulbenkian Foundation, and ensured him five more years of impunity in a Manhattan mansion not far from Jeffrey Epstein's.

  Not asked about the state media allowed into the UN and Guterres' rare press conferences by his head of media accreditation Melissa Fleming, Guterres had received a letter to reconsider his attendance. Had Guterres answered, or even read it? Inner City Press would ask, if only in writing while it remains banned from entering the UN, and blocked on Twitter by China's Ambassador Zhang.
 
  The letter concludes, "as the highest representative of the UN, your attendance will be seen as credence to China’s blatant disregard for international human rights laws and serve to embolden the actions of the Chinese authorities. We therefore urge you to reconsider your decision to attend the 2022 Beijing Winter Games." Fat chance. Fat Tony. 

Sidebar on Tony's cronies: Qatar state media asked about why the UN escalators weren't working, to get him up the three flights of stairs to Al Jazeera's four large offices (there was, of course, a bank of elevators).   

    A retired French correspondent who had held a fundraiser with now-convicted global pedophile Ghislaine Maxwell asked a similar question in French. Dujarric, also French and a genocide denier for the UN's Secretary General who less gleefully covered up the Rwanda genocide, answered in French, and smiled.

     "No more questions?" Dujarric asked rhetorically, glancing down at the empty mirror of those the UN's media accreditation chief Melissa Fleming allow to ask questions remotely, as nearly every institution in this time of COVID-19, the link of which to Wuhan she spent public money to censor.    Then I leave you in the hands of Paulina Kubiak, Dujarric said.

  The second spokeswoman in only four months for UN General Assembly President Abdul Shahid of the Maldives, also purchased by China, also going to the Genocide Games.

  She spoke, without irony, about Shahid calling for an Olympic truce. This while the host was involved in the mass killing and incarceration of Uighurs in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as many including Kurt Wheelock referred to it.

For her, there were no questions at all, not even about the escalator.   It was over. The UN's legitimacy had died long before. But this was a new low, and a new season. And a next text, follow-up to Belt and Roadkill: Genocide Games of Guterres.


 Will Guterres be taking his Deputy Amina J. Mohammed, supportive of the killing and targeted detentions perpetrated by Buhari of Nigeria? See, Identity Thieves - and, forthcoming, Genocide Games of Guterres. For now, Belt and Roadkill.   

***

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