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Back in March a series of criminal complaints were revealed all of which involved people acting as agents of the Chinese Communist Party who were targeting dissidents here in the Unites States. For instance, one of the targets was a former student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who had decided to run for office in New York.

Another target of the CCP was Chen Weiming, a Chinese dissident artist living in California. He created the large sculpture seen above known as “CCP Virus” which depicted Chinese president Xi Jinping as a virus.

In March, three men were indicted for trying to gather information on Chen Weiming for the purpose of discrediting him and for plotting to destroy is anti-CCP artwork. “CCP Virus” was in fact burned down shortly after it was revealed but it’s not know if the men indicted for plotting to destroy it were responsible as they were all apparently in New York at the time.

Today, a superseding indictment announced by the DOJ added two more people to the three previously indicted in this case. One of them is a current DHS officer and the other is a retired DHS officer.

The superseding indictment adds two new defendants, Craig Miller and Derrick Taylor, to the scheme. Miller is a 15-year employee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), currently assigned as a deportation officer to DHS’s Emergency Relief Operations in Minneapolis, and Taylor is a retired DHS law enforcement agent who presently works as a private investigator in Irvine, California…

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According to the indictment, one of Liu’s co-conspirators (“Co-conspirator”) retained Taylor to obtain personal identification information regarding multiple PRC dissidents residing in the United States, including passport information and photos, and flight and immigration records, which Taylor allegedly tasked to two DHS law enforcement officers, including Miller. As alleged, Miller and the other DHS agent obtained the information from the restricted database and improperly provided it to Taylor, who shared it with the Co-conspirator. Liu, Ziburis and Sun used this information to target and harass these U.S. residents while acting on behalf of the PRC government.

So the three original conspirators hired Taylor to get information on artist Chen Weiming and possibly others. Taylor, who was a retired DHS officer, contacted current DHS officer Miller and asked him to run a list of names through a government database and hand back the information. Taylor was apparently paid by the conspirators for his work and Miller was paid off for running the names through the database with a gift card sent to him by Taylor.

Just an aside here but long ago in a former life I worked for the Social Security Administration. SSA has a huge database full of detailed personal and earnings information on nearly everyone in the US including every celebrity and politician you could name. We were always carefully warned that any search of certain databases containing that detailed information had to be justifiable based on whatever work we were doing because the searches themselves were logged and routinely reviewed. That meant that if you decided to run a query to see how much Michael Jackson earned in a given year or what your member of Congress’ Social Security number was, you were almost certainly going to get caught, then fired and maybe prosecuted. I heard stories about some dummies who didn’t heed those warnings and wound up out of a job.

All of that to say, you can’t just run names thought a sensitive government database and hope no one notices. There will be a record and they will know who was logged in on what machine at what time. But I guess these guys didn’t heed those warnings because when the FBI came to speak to Miller and Taylor they lied about their involvement.

According to court documents, Miller and Taylor both lied about their past conduct when confronted by the FBI. According to the indictment, Miller deleted text messages with Taylor from his phone while being interviewed by the FBI, and Taylor instructed a co-conspirator to withhold evidence from the U.S. government. When interviewed by the FBI, Taylor falsely claimed that he obtained the records in question from a friend who was using the “Black Dark Web” — likely a reference to the dark web…

According to court documents, when interviewed by the FBI, Miller initially claimed to be in sporadic contact with Taylor and said the two did not discuss work matters. After agents admonished Miller to be honest, Miller admitted that Taylor provided him names to run through law enforcement databases. Miller granted consent to the FBI to search his phone, and ultimately admitted that he ran the queries for Taylor and sent the results to Taylor via text message, and that Taylor had provided a gift card in return. Miller then admitted that he deleted the text chain with Taylor during the interview earlier that day and that he fabricated all earlier statements about the text chain, including whether the chain included the names requested by Taylor.

Anyway, it’s bad enough these guys were misusing their authority like this for a few bucks and a gift card. It’s even worse that they were doing it (knowingly or not) on behalf of the CCP.

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