Kash’s Corner: How Did the Pentagon Leaker Get Access to All These Documents? Multiple Secret CCP Police Stations in America Exposed
In this episode of Kash’s Corner, we take a look at the two Chinese men recently arrested by the FBI in connection with a secret Chinese police station in New York City. This is just one among multiple Chinese Communist Party (CCP) police outposts in the United States, according to the watchdog group Safeguard Defenders.In two separate cases, the DOJ is charging 40 Chinese officials and police with conducting a coordinated harassment campaign against Chinese dissidents residing in the United States.And we continue looking at the Pentagon leaks. How did the suspected leaker, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsmen, get access to so many pages of classified documents?
Even though Jan and I are on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, there's too much breaking news and national security defense and intel for us to take the week off.
So thank you to the Epoch crew and staff for making this a reality.
Jan, there's a couple of things I know you want to jump into.
Where should we start?
So there's been these two arrests in New York of people that are allegedly agents of the Chinese communist regime that working out of this Chinese police station.
Um part of this bigger effort that safeguard defenders expose these stations that have been set up by the CCP all around the world.
That's one.
I really want to dig into that and the implications of what these things are and of this particular indictment.
We were also looking at AI, and we've been learning, you know, in this recent interview with Elon Musk that you know, he says AI is being taught to lie.
And finally, the Pentagon papers.
You know, we have this, you know, what's ostensibly an egregious leak, but it's also given us some incredibly important information to work with.
So we got to kind of break that all down.
Let's start with the Chinese uh communist party police stations in the US.
I mean, I I still can't really believe that I'm saying that exactly.
And these have been operating with impunity for quite some time.
Yeah, so Jan, it's no surprise to certainly you and our most of our audience that the CCP, their number one adversary is the United States of America, and they don't act with any respect to any sort of laws, international or otherwise.
So it doesn't surprise me that they are intruding upon our infrastructures or personnel to gain leverage over America.
The fashion which they have now been caught doing it might slightly be stunning to some folks who you know weren't in the government or have much government intelligence experience.
But let's break it down.
So there's actually two separate prosecutions.
In lane, you have two prosecutions of two human beings who are actually arrested in New York City for conducting operations to damage America.
Let's just leave it at that for right now.
Prosecution track number two.
It was a 40-person bot farm.
The Chinese government, the CCP has been caught utilizing them in mainland China and in the United States of America to coordinate a information attack campaign against Chinese dissidents in the United States of America.
That's sort of the sum and substance of it, Jan.
Well, these two individuals in the first track that were charged, um, you know, they're actually kind of known to the Epoch Times and known to people in uh New York Chinatown, basically as being people who organize who have been involved in organizing counter-protests to dissident protests, for example.
Yeah.
And so what's shocking to many, even in government is the extent that the Chinese government, the C CP has come in and placed individuals throughout American society, um, not just in New York City.
Jan, there's actually reporting out there talking about these police stations, as we'll call them for now, um, in multiple cities in the United States of America.
And from a government perspective, in order to install anyone overseas in an official diplomatic capacity is a major lift because your two nations have to have a diplomatic relationship, and then you exchange documentation,
you stand up embassies are the most popular example, and you allow people from treasury and your DOJ and your law enforcement, intel military communities to nest over in their country and vice versa.
What happens when a CCP comes on board?
They use these non-benign diplomatic postings to infiltrate American society for a maleficent purpose, i.e.
trying to harm Chinese dissidents in the United States of America.
So they're violating not just our national sovereignty, but as we now have been shown by the DOJ, federal statutes to obstruct justice and conspire literally against the United States of America.
Because that's what you're doing.
And just think of it on the other way around, Yan.
What if the United States of America had sent American government employees throughout mainland China, Beijing or otherwise, and task them with the following?
We want you to go buy land in mainland China, set up an infrastructure system, and on behalf of the United States government, we want you to collect against Xi Jinping and his allies.
I think the main, I think the CCP would have a problem with that, right?
They would think it an absolute violation of their national sovereignty.
That's just what they've done to us.
These are the two guys that have gotten caught so far, but I don't believe for a second they're the only two, and it's in the only cities in New York City.
And so as the discovery process comes along, we'll learn a lot more information.
But Yan, the problem with this type of case, me being a former national security prosecutor, is almost the entirety of this case, unlike 99.9% of all prosecutions, this one involves classified information.
What makes that very difficult for a federal prosecutor is you cannot use classified information in a public court.
So you have to get the information declassified.
And you're talking about some pretty sensitive stuff here when you are talking about collecting against CCP officials, spies for lack of a better word, who have been installed in mainland America to collect against America and our government.
Now, in order to do that, some of the information is going to be unclassified, but the way in which we go about detecting and collecting against that is going to be classified.
So there's a very methodical process at DOJ, which I utilize on multiple occasions to prosecute defendants in these types of cases that has to be undertaken before you even get to an arrest or an indictment because you can't have that information still be classified.
That means the intelligence community, all of it, all 17 agencies have to sign off on the information you are going to put out in public to bring this prosecution.
So it's a very lengthy uh ordeal.
And the fact that these guys were arrested just this week means to me this investigation is probably at least one year in the making.
Well, yeah, and then frankly, these uh, you know, again, so-called police stations, uh, they've been running for years.
This is not a like a new phenomenon.
And you know, it just highlights to me how bizarrely naive I maybe um we've been on on this side of the Atlantic or that side of the Pacific, you know, with respect to Chinese Communist Party intentions, because it's just it's strains credulity that one would allow such things under the cover of providing you know diplomatic support, right?
So many of these entities exist, not just in the US but around the world.
Yeah, and there needs to be swifter action, in my opinion.
A couple of individuals is step one.
But as we've been shown by these prosecutions, the Chinese government, the CCP, has a parallel process uh parallel track to perpetuate these crimes.
They have a bot farm in mainland China to support this activity.
That means they have an entire troll station with, according to the other indictment, 40 plus individuals sitting in mainland China supporting this substation, police station, whatever you want to call it, with its manpower in New York City and the United States of America.
So they have thought this thing out.
Of course, they're gonna come in and deny it, but the actions from the United States government should be the expulsion of Chinese diplomats, at least the majority of them for violating the diplomatic agreement between our countries.
Just think, what would Xi Jinping do, going back to our earlier point, if he caught government assets from the United States of America on his soil, acting in concert to violate Chinese national sovereignty?
It would be an international crisis, and they would not hesitate to act.
And I think that's the distinction.
While The federal prosecution is great because it helps us hold people accountable publicly.
What our government needs to do is implement some heavy trade sanctions, some swift and forceful economic sanctions, and start expelling diplomats immediately and say, hey, Xi Jinping, you have violated United States national sovereignty.
It doesn't get much bigger than this, Jan.
And I'm surprised, but I guess I'm not surprised by the reticence from the Biden administration in a swift response here.
A prosecution just is not enough.
Of course, this classified information piece makes me think of you know this uh the Pentagon leak that has been in the news everywhere.
And we've got two sides of the coin here.
On one side, we've got some very, very valuable information that was revealed.
And I want to get you to kind of comment on what it means, like what we've learned actually through what's been disclosed.
And the other side is that this leak happened in the first place and how did it happen?
And you know, and there's quite a bit of discussion about whether this is a good or a bad thing, and I want to explore that.
So let's start with what the intelligence actually means.
So, look, that we now know, according to the disclosures that were made, at least that's been reported in the media.
I think the heart of the matter is that the effort by the United States government to fund on a large scale assistance to the Ukrainians for their war effort against Russia and Vladimir Putin has failed.
Now, many organizations have been saying that, many politicians have been saying that.
But the crux of the matter is the Biden administration and a lot of politicians have been saying we are succeeding in the Ukraine.
The problem we have here is that you now have reporting, if accurate, that shows that to be a lie.
And it's not like it's a reporting from Australia or Canada or another five eyes partner, as we call them.
It's United States Intelligence Collection from the Department of Defense, which is a member of the intelligence community.
And specifically, the DoD is the one responsible for war fighting operations planning, assistance, and training overseas in places like the Ukraine.
So what I've called for publicly is why hasn't the House Armed Services Committee, the committee of jurisdiction in the House of Representatives, and it's the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Senate side, immediately issued subpoenas to Secretary Austin and Chairman Milley, who lead our DOD, and ask them why did you not provide accurate information to the White House and Congress?
Or is this leak can totally incorrect?
Is it completely made up?
Is it a bogus story?
The other question that the Armed Services Committee needs to ask is was the gang of eight, and reminding our audience, the gang of eight is the top eight leaders in Congress in the House and the Senate from Democrat and Republican parties who are put in place by law to oversee the intelligence that goes to the president, so that someone else other than the commander-in-chief has access to it.
And so, as a co-equal branch of government, they have oversight of it for this specific purpose.
If a president was lied to, or if a president had information and went out and lied to the world about the success or failures of an operation, then they need to be held to account.
But I've seen no action from Congress, the Armed Services Committee, or the gang of eight to indicate they're moving to acquire this information, which I think is as problematic as the information that was released itself.
Now we've had an arrest, just like we talked about in the first uh subject with the uh Chinese police stations.
Prosecution is a good thing, it's a step, but it does not reveal the entirety of the situation.
We must look, this is an internal operation that we can so far tell.
We don't know if he had external assistance from foreign governments or foreign actors.
It looks like the leaker had assistance through chat rooms and other individuals that were involved.
And uh, we can get into why I believe I think he had assistance in the Department of Defense, but there needs to be an accountability measure undertaken by Congress, And it's just entirely lacking right now, which to me is it's as bad as the leak.
So let's start on this on this side of things.
You basically said in our previous episode, you mentioned that based on the kind of lack of response from the DoD or the intelligence community around the saying this is catacorp, this information is categorically false, it's a fabrication, whatever, that most likely it's accurate.
That's what we said last week.
And so this hasn't changed.
So we've been kind of assuming that this information is accurate.
Now, if it's accurate, you know, there's many people out there that are basically saying, wow, this guy is a hero.
This guy's actually a whistleblower, right?
This guy's a whistleblower, and he's, and this is really important information to shape our foreign policy decision making, right?
So thank you for that.
And on the other hand, you're saying that that he should be prosecuted.
I mean, we touched on this last week, but this is a very serious question that a lot of people have right now.
Yeah.
And I think the answer lies within your question, Jan.
He could have been a whistleblower.
There is statutes in place for individuals like this who want to expose government waste fraud and abuse and corruption to the United States Congress via the Intelligence Committee or the Armed Services Committee or the Judiciary Committee or what have you.
The United States Congress has legislated for this specific purpose.
And being a former senior staffer in the House Intel committee who accepted whistleblower complaints and knowing how that process works, he could have done that.
And let me remind the audience, Jan, this individual has been at it for six months at a minimum.
So a uniformed United States military employee decided on his own to take information over a month-long campaign and disperse it illegally on the internet.
I refuse to believe for one second his good intentions could not have been met by becoming a whistleblower.
He knows the United States government.
He could have hand delivered this information to many committees of jurisdiction, and this information could have gotten out, and he would not have broken the law.
People may regale him as a hero because they like the information that was produced, but it does not give him the right to break the law.
Then people on our comments board last week, I'm glad there was such a uh a vigorous discussion on it compared to him to Julian Assange and called called for his uh pardoning.
And I don't call for that.
I think Julian Assange committed espionage and should be prosecuted.
Um, it doesn't matter what the substance of the information is.
The ends do not justify the means in the United States of America.
They never have, they never should.
And if we or any sector of our community says, oh, because it exposed this huge corruption, we must permit it.
Just think of what happens next.
Who's coming out next to leak all sorts of sensitive information to achieve what is I identify as a political objective?
Because if you are U.S. employee entrusted with our nation's secrets, serving our nation to protect its independence and freedom, then you cannot go out there and break the law to achieve your objective.
And I still don't know what his objective is entirely.
We don't have the uh entire case out there yet.
We don't know who else he worked with.
Um, there's no way he did it alone.
So there's too many questions out there, even putting aside my feeling on whether or not he should be prosecuted.
There's so many other questions that I think we need to get to the public before they make their final determination on this.
But I know there's always going to be people out there that say, you're wrong, he should uh not be prosecuted.
And I just disagree.
So Cash, the response to this would be, you know, we're living at a time where you know we've seen these Twitter files, disclosures and you know, discovery from multiple lawsuits.
It's been shown in reporting, frankly, that even we've done that certain elements of the intelligence community and DOD and DOJ have kind of been weaponized against Americans of the security state.
And in this sort of situation, you can imagine, right?
People thinking, oh, I'm not gonna, I can't trust the system, I have to go around it, right?
Like this is I mean, a lot of people that heard what you just said, right, might be thinking exactly what I'm saying right now.
And how how do you respond to that?
It's the United States of America.
You can't break the law to perform an act which you might think is saving the union or critical to our existence.
It's the reason we are different from the majority of nations out there, especially like the CCP and Vladimir Putin and their corrupt regimes.
We do not allow for that in the US of A. And look, there's no one more frustrated than me when you have a system in the US that is failing.
And I am in wild agreement with you on the fact that things like the Twitter files have exposed government waste, fraud, and abuse.
But so have whistleblowers, namely the FBI whistleblowers that came forward and exposed corruption at the FBI.
And it's not an easy path.
It's definitely not fun for those individuals, but we cannot have a national security apparatus that is stood up and premised in the law only to allow people to break it.
Because the next person that says it is going to say, oh, I did it for an objective that I thought was right.
So give me a pass, just like you gave that other guy.
But the distinction is going to be what is the ultimate objective of the person, and it becomes subjective.
Oh, he was a far left individual versus a far right individual.
This for this very reason, Jan, is why I don't agree and why the United States of America does not allow for an illegal type of disclosure just to correct even a failing piece of the United States government, which I agree with you.
This is a massive exposure, and we're going to learn a lot from it.
But I violently disagree with the way this individual went about it, and I'm not cheering him on.
Because then I would be cheering on the next iteration of it and the hundred that would follow that.
And to me, that is the slippery slope.
You never want to cannonball down.
So and to your point, Cash, you know, strategic leaking of classified information has actually been used by multiple people, for example, during the past administration, right?
Basically, to achieve particular ends.
In this case, I think you've also argued that the leaker in no way acted alone.
Yeah.
And I here's why.
Um sort of, and to remind our audience, when we covered this last week, a lot of information broke after since we last covered it in between filming sessions.
So that's why we're continuing the conversation here.
The reason, and from my experience as both the deputy D and I and chief of staff at DOD and having worked operationally in intelligence community space, that the information we're talking about, which for folks who haven't seen last week's episode, go check it out because it's the underlying groundwork for answering the next question.
The reason he can't act alone is because he cannot access this information individually, and he cannot more importantly disclose it individually for a month's long campaign.
Yeah, and it's not like he took a sheet of paper, one piece that was classified and say, here you go, give it over to the media, publish it on the internet.
From what we're told, he has hundreds of documents, lots of pages of material.
That means he went in and out on multiple occasions, access secure compartment and information facilities, skiffs, vaults that houses type of information and the level of information we're talking about that we discussed last week, that style of intelligence that's classified, just because you have a top secret SCI clearance doesn't mean you have the need to know to access it.
That's the distinction here.
Lots of government employees have it, what we call a TSSCI, top secret secure compartment and information clearance.
The overwhelming majority of those individuals do not have a need to know of 95% of what is top secret SCI.
So they have never given access to it.
This individual falls in that in that basket because as a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, no, you should not have information about Masadi intelligence collection.
As a 21 year old Air National Guardsman, you should not have troop movements in the UN in and around the Ukraine.
And Vladimir Putin's responses to that posturing.
You just shouldn't have it because you're not involved in any level in the operational policy or planning decision making that that intelligence is utilized for.
And so for him, as a 21-year-old E3, as his uh level was in the in the military, he just doesn't have access to it.
So how did he get it?
We don't know that yet.
Who else did he give it to?
Was he working with someone on the outside?
Um, there's a lot of questions that remain unanswered.
Is there going to be another disclosure?
Maybe.
Maybe he gave a bunch of stuff to someone else.
It seems from the public reporting, this individual's objective by disclosing this information was to inform the world about this, these subject matters.
So it seems like he wanted a bunch of stuff out there.
And that means to me he thought about it methodically, being an individual in the United States military with access to classified information, knowing it's illegal to collect it and distribute it outside.
He had to have thought of a plan to do so and acted in concert with somebody or had some assistance.
Because here's the here's the thing I haven't talked about anywhere yet, Jan.
If I'm wrong and that he acted alone, we have an even bigger problem.
How did some guy at 21 years of age access the United States of America's most secure intelligence information and then leak it all on his own?
To me, that's an even bigger problem for the intelligence community.
So it's not about me being right or wrong, but the alternative is shockingly worse for the national security apparatus in this country.
Well, and I was just, as we've been talking here, I'm sort of imagining the situation, right?
Let's say you have, you know, people of different political persuasions for different strategic reasons, leaking classified information.
Um could become a kind of a war of that, if you will.
And in the end, it kind of is breaking down the system.
This is kind of what this extreme left onslaught that America is facing today is actually all about.
It's about breaking down the system.
And this is just frankly a very difficult thing to deal with when you are on the side of trying to fight for rule of law, fight for the system that allows for freedom and liberty and so forth.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so another area, you know, that is endangering all this actually right now is this development of AI.
So we have this, you know, recent interview with Elon Musk where he talks about AI being taught to lie.
I saw, you know, Victor Davis Hansen, someone, you know, I to I speak with regularly on American thought leaders, has was on record talking about how very left-wing falsehood talking points that have made themselves into the academy revisionist history is becoming in some cases the norm, and how certain AI chat bots are responding to queries around history.
There's always been this, you know, attempt in communist societies, for example, to erase history to rewrite history.
It's like this is you read in 1984 in George Orwell.
There was a you know whole department dedicated to this.
It's a central theme in the book, right?
But in with AI, this kind of takes this whole idea to a new level where you know, essentially, whole swathes of you know, digitized history can be completely erased and rewritten into something very ideological.
Yeah, it's a not surprising but shocking development.
And what I mean by that is we're talking about going back and changing historical fact, um, like that's mentioned in one of these articles we could put up for our audience about Al Gore's father and his affiliation or opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act versus what AI is doing on the internet to correct to change that hard fact of history.
That's just one example of where it's going in terms of historical spaces.
But the same implications for AI there, to me, my my expertise doesn't come from that part of it, but from the government's utilization of it.
But I think it applies to both areas of conversation we're having right now.
AI serves a purpose.
Of course it does.
But my central thesis up front is AI cannot replace human manpower.
Just can't.
And when you try to do that, then you run into these problems of his of revisionist history.
And in the government space, you run into these problems of missing critical evidence and intelligence that could prevent another attack that could lead to a criminal objective that you've been looking for.
That could lead to a war if we missed the intelligence or got it wrong.
The Persian Gulf War being the prime example of that, and us being on the precipice of war in the Ukraine, this is why it's so critical to talk about because I talk to my friends all the time, my former colleagues.
AI is great because here's what we do.
We ingest all of this intelligence and all this information, comes into the United States government.
And then we say, okay, well, it's stored in all these databases.
How do we go through it?
Of course, we don't have the human manpower to go through everything person by person.
But we can't have AI supplant human manpower.
It should supplement it.
And I think if we figure out a way to do that, then they can coexist.
What you're talking about, Jan, in the media reporting and revisionist history is AI is just going out there and uniformly just disbanding fact and replacing it with fiction.
There's no human being in place to say, well, what is this algorithm doing?
And then taking one step further back, who put this algorithm in place?
Who created it?
Who bought it?
Who paid for it?
Who sold it?
And in government, you want to know the same thing.
Where's this algorithm, these AI machinery coming from?
And where are we sending it?
And who has access to it?
Because remember, at the end of the day, AI is artificial intelligence.
That means there's an input and an output.
So someone is getting everything that is being generated by that AI system.
Who is that someone?
Are we open to vulnerability?
Can we can a foreign adversary, the CCP, use AI in the United States of America and intrude upon our systems and expand their police station operation across the United States of America?
I bet you they did just that, Jan.
They've got the AI hub station in Beijing that we talked about earlier.
So why wouldn't they use it for that nefarious illegal purpose?
This discussion has gone on for a long time, and I'm glad it's now front and center because of things that are being discussed by AI's involvement in big tech at Google, at Facebook, at Twitter, and the like.
Those institutions are going to continue to use more and more and more and more AI.
And someone, whether it's Congress or the executive branch or elsewhere, needs to step in and say, hang on a second, what are we doing in the government intelligence space to countermand the abuses that AI has allowed and will lead to.
So, you know, multiple things that occur to me here.
Okay, number one, reading this recent piece by Jacob Siegel and tablet.
Um intelligence officer, he talks about how it's this kind of fever dream and intelligence to have the perfect amount of information or perfect information, so which can then be digested using some kind of systems like AI to basically make perfect determinations.
This is the holy grail in these communities, and you're basically explaining here why that can never work.
The second piece that's actually occurring to me here is I can't help but think that okay.
Imagine a situation where you know the people that were programming these things have rigorous commitment to measuring objective reality as best as you can, right?
And that's what's being, you know, basically programmed in, or that ethic also is being programmed into the AI.
But the reality is what we know is that the many of the people programming these things believe that reality is constructed, believe That in very specific particular narratives that should be the correct narratives, reality be damned.
And so, you know, what are the implications of that for AI?
And this is what this is Elon Musk talking about, you know, AI is being taught to lie.
It's being taught to, I suppose, pursue narratives over reality and explain those narratives as if they were reality to the people using it.
Yeah, and I think you know, you said it in a very uh meaningful way that I I want to leave with our audience is this.
I mean, this conversation can't possibly end today.
What happens when AI couples with bad actors?
Someone has to build the AI.
Then what happens, whether it's in the media space, the big tech space, or the government space, bad actors or bad individuals take that AI and use it for nefarious unlawful purposes.
To me, that's the ultimate problem we face with artificial intelligence.
And there's no short-term solution for it right now.
Well, the third piece that I that I didn't mention yet is that most of the most cutting-edge AI development, I'm talking about Microsoft and Google, for example.
Uh, a lot of it is actually being done in China in scenarios.
And what that means is is that basically the technology, the CCP has been given access to it because that's the condition on operating there.
And I find this terrifying.
Again, a reality where you know, you you have a system that basically has no guardrails.
If there is a civil military fusion doctrine, if there is a military application for a technology, which, you know, obviously, this there's a massive military application of technology technology here.
Um it's it's exploited as much as possible.
So, you know, it how is it that we're still doing this development uh in China?
I mean, the short answer is money, and there's no regulation right now that I'm aware of from the United States government standpoint that is a check on performing that type of activity, taking and creating and deploying an AI from a US company in mainland China.
I mean, just think about it.
Chinese government does the opposite all day long.
TikTok.
That is on some level, an algorithmic-based infrastructure system that operates partially on AI that the Chinese use to tunnel into America.
So when we give them one that they didn't build themselves and hosted in mainland China, what do you think the CCP's doing?
Look at the CCP's unlawful conduct by setting up police stations across America.
And now we have companies like Google and Amazon and Apple and all that distributing or deploying pieces of this AI that they are creating as American businesses in mainland China, and we're to believe that it's fully safeguarded from the CCP, not for one second.
And that, Jan, is the biggest pending problem that's coming on the AI front.
Well, it's huge.
I mean, the RD operate major RD operations are located there.
And I might add one more thing.
You know, I've described AI as have being kind of a voracious devourer of information.
I mean, basically, the more information the idea is the more information you can feed into these into these AI, the faster they can develop the more information they have to uh to to basically you know make their calculations, right?
And and ostensibly be more effective.
China would be an incredibly uh attractive place to do AI R D. I think this might be another another reason because you know, the amount to ingest is so massive because you know, you have this whole social credit system operating, right?
Which is, you know, sort of micro information, unbelievable detailed amounts of information on every single citizen and so on and so forth.
So I mean again, the implications to me are staggering.
Yeah, like anything else from a national security perspective, Jan, if the CCP is involved, you can bet that they are going to use it in some fashion to attack or degrade the United States of America.
And that to me is the bottom line.
Well, Cash, you know, tough tough topics today, tough topics.
It's time for our shout-out.
It is tough topics.
That's what we tackle on the show, and I'm very appreciative that we have an audience that will tell us what they think even when they disagree with us.
This isn't a show that's supposed to go out there and have 100% uniformity.
And the topics of this week's episode, I think, highlight that.
And this week's shout out goes to Gary Long.
Thank you so much for your suggestion and commentary on our chat board for Cash's Corner.
And thank you everybody else who posted so much extensive comments from last week's episode.
We review them thoroughly and it builds a better show for you all in the coming weeks to come.
