Call her ChiFi

WASHINGTON — If there were any doubts that Sen.
Dianne Feinstein’s loyalties lean more toward
protecting her rich husband’s financial interests in
Communist China than protecting America’s strategic
interests in East Asia — namely Taiwan — she put
them to rest recently.

In the span of two weeks, the California Democrat
parroted mainland objections over pending U.S. arms
sales to missile-targeted Taiwan and broadcast a
maudlin mea culpa to Beijing’s hardliners for the
international crisis that they caused.

First, the weepy apology.

“I want the Chinese to know that I, as a senior
senator from California, am deeply sorry about the
loss of a Chinese pilot,” she blubbered April 4 on
CNN.

Then she broadened it to: “We’re sorry.”

Apparently she threw in the extra apology for her
husband, Richard “Dick” Blum, whose investment firm
has raised more than $100 million for China and would
like to keep doing business there.

But DiFi, as she’s fondly known in the media, didn’t
stop there.

Later in the broadcast, she actually doubted that the
ChiComs acted aggressively in clipping our plane and
holding our airmen. Then, sounding more like the
Chinese ambassador, she cautioned President Bush to
“be careful in making demands.”

The week before the crisis, she whined about the U.S.
selling ally Taiwan a Patriot anti-missile defense
system and destroyers equipped with missile-detecting
Aegis radar.

The sale of such “offensive” arms, as she called them,
“would clearly be viewed by the People’s Republic of
China as outside the bounds of the relationship with
Taiwan to which we committed ourselves.”

“For those reasons, we would oppose it,” she said in a
March 28 article she penned with Sen. Craig Thomas,
R-Wyo.

Beijing’s news organ, Xinhau, couldn’t have written
better propaganda.

In fact, the arms aren’t for “offensive” purposes, but
to help Taiwan defend itself against the battery of
missiles Beijing is building up across the Taiwan
Strait.

Conveniently, Feinstein failed to make that
connection, even though she knows about China’s
threatening missile build-up.

Why? Bluntly put, she and her husband are in bed with
the Reds. Their relationship goes back more than two
decades. Here are some highlights:

 

• When she was San Francisco mayor, from 1978 to 1988,
  Feinstein led trade and other delegations to Chinese
  cities. She made Shanghai the sister city of San
  Francisco, and got Beijing to set up a consulate in
  San Francisco. Chinese President Jiang Zemin was
  Shanghai’s mayor at the time, and they developed a
  close relationship.

 

 

• Feinstein’s financial disclosures show that her
  husband’s money-management firm owns stakes in
  Shanghai Pacific, Golden China and other partnerships
  that invest in China. Blum is also chummy with Jiang.

 

 

• Blum’s partner at San Francisco-based Newbridge
  Capital also serves as a consultant to a Hong Kong
  subsidiary of Cosco, the state-owned shipping company
  that was busted in 1996 for smuggling 2,000 AK-47s into
  the U.S. through Oakland, Calif. Cosco enlisted President
  Clinton and others to help it lease an old naval port
  in Long Beach, Calif. GOP lawmakers blocked the deal,
  which would have in effect given the Chinese military
  a U.S. beachhead.

 

 

• Blum’s partner, Peter Kwok, also has helped CITIC, or
  China International Trust and Investment Corp., raise
  money. The state-run company, an auxiliary of the
  Chinese army, is headed by Chinese arms dealer Wang
  Jun.

 

 

• Thanks in part to his senator wife, whom he wed in
  1990, Blum has enjoyed an unusual degree of access to
  top officials in the Chinese Communist Party. Since
  1995, Blum has accompanied Feinstein on at least three
  trips to China, meeting with senior government
  officials in Beijing, including Jiang. (For instance,
  Feinstein on July 11, 1995, wrote Jiang a letter
  asking if she could come to China to meet with him. He
  agreed, and in late August, both she and Blum visited
  with him.)

 

 

• In January 1996, just a few weeks after Blum had
  coffee with President Clinton, he and Feinstein
  visited Beijing again. But this time they got an
  upgrade in accommodations, dining in Mao’s old home
  and spending the night there. They were the first
  foreigners allowed to see Mao’s bedroom. (What a treat
  that must have been, staying in the lair of a
  pedophile and mass murderer!)

 

 

• In July 1996, the FBI briefed Feinstein about a
  Chinese government plot to funnel illegal donations to
  her campaign. She said she was shocked, even though
  she has the closest links to high-level Chinese
  government officials of any member in Congress (save
  perhaps GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose wife, Labor
  Secretary Elaine Chao, knows Jiang through her
  China-born shipping-magnate father). Five
  other lawmakers were warned of the Chinese plot to
  launder $1.8 million to their campaigns in exchange
  for renewal of China’s most-favored-nation trade
  status. (Feinstein says she didn’t pay much
  attention when the FBI warned her to be on guard for
  donations from China, because she claims agents didn’t
  give her enough information — though she didn’t
  bother to seek more details from the FBI until the story
  broke in the press nine months later.)

 

 

• That same year, Feinstein and her husband held a
  $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser dinner for President
  Clinton at their San Francisco home. Chinese
  businessman Dai Xiaoming showed up, guest of none
  other than convicted fund-raiser and Chinese bagman
  John Huang. Dai, who’s not a U.S. citizen, can’t make
  political contributions. Oops. Feinstein and her hubby
  blame the Democratic National Committee for the
  mix-up.

 

 

• The next year, 1997, Feinstein returned $12,000 in
  illegal campaign gifts from employees of Huang’s
  Indonesia-based Lippo Bank, which has ties to Beijing.
  She got the laundered dough at a huge 1994 event in
  Los Angeles also attended by Clinton.

 

 

• Feinstein shows up in Huang’s 1999 indictment. He
  made an illegal $5,000 donation to the California
  Victory Fund ’94, some of which was shared by
  Feinstein’s campaign that year.

 

 

• In July 1997, Hong Kong reverted back to Chinese
  control. Guess who was there for the ceremonies? DiFi.
  (Oddly, she was a no-show at the Panama Canal handover
  ceremony.)

 

Feinstein downplays her Red contacts as official
business. Heck, someone has to constructively engage
reform-minded tyrants.

And never mind her husband’s investments in China,
she says. He’s vowed to donate any profits to his
charity, the American Himalayan Foundation.

Besides, she says she’s built a “fire wall” between
her husband’s investments and her positions on trade
with China. Pish-posh, not to worry.

Only, Feinstein has actively supported normalized
trade with China every year such legislation has come
up for vote — legislation from which her husband’s
San Francisco investment shop has stood to gain.

And now, in trying to deny Taiwan the arms it needs to
defend itself from mainland attack, and apologizing
for Beijing’s latest act of aggression, she’s still
looking out for China’s interests, which just happen
to dovetail with her husband’s.

DiFi’s conflict is not only unseemly, it’s
unpatriotic. And voters shouldn’t let her go on
pretending to represent U.S. interests abroad.

Californians, though they’ll have to wait a few years,
should say bye-bye to ChiFi.

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After reading this column, many readers have asked me
why in the world a GOP senator — Craig Thomas of
Wyoming — would co-sign with Sen. Feinstein,
D-Beijing, such a pro-Beijing commentary?

I’ll let this passage from Michael Barone’s “The
Almanac of American Politics” explain: “Thomas chairs
the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of
Foreign Affairs. There he spent most of his time on
China. He favors normal trade relations with China and
has not pushed the use of force. He has worked closely
with the Clinton administration on China issues.”