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Haley has said panel wages ‘pathological’ anti-Israel campaign
U.K.’s Johnson has said council is flawed but has value
The Trump administration plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, making good on a pledge to leave a body it has long accused of hypocrisy and criticized as biased against Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley plan to announce the withdrawal at the State Department in Washington at 5 p.m., the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing a decision that hadn’t yet been made public.
The 47-member council, based in Geneva and created in 2006, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump’s immigration policy by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. He called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally “unconscionable.”
The U.S. withdrawal had been expected. National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the body’s creation when he was U.S. ambassador to the UN in 2006. In a speech to the council last year, Haley called out the body for what she said was its “relentless, pathological campaign” against Israel. She has also called for ways to expel members of the council that have poor human rights records themselves.
Won’t ‘Sit Quietly’
“For our part, the United States will not sit quietly while this body, supposedly dedicated to human rights, continues to damage the cause of human rights,” Haley said at the time. “In the end, no speech and no structural reforms will save the members of the Human Rights Council from themselves.”
A State Department spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, while the UN said it hadn’t received a notification that the U.S. was withdrawing.
The move comes as the Trump administration is under intense criticism from business groups, human rights organizations and lawmakers from both parties over its recently imposed decision to separate children from parents who enter the U.S. illegally.
Even some critics of the human rights council have called for continuing to push for a revamping of the body rather than quitting it.
On the opening day of the council’s current session, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson criticized the body’s perennial agenda item dedicated to Israel and the Palestinian territories, calling it “damaging to the cause of peace.” Nonetheless, he said the U.K. wasn’t “blind to the value of this council.”
The council is scheduled to discuss Israel and the Palestinian territories on July 2, according to its agenda.
*** Sheesh, judged by the company you keep eh? As a reminder, GW Bush removed the United States and Barack Obama reversed that.
The USCIS is authorized to cancel any Certificate of Citizenship or Naturalization in cases where evidence provided to government documents is proven false.
Just 5 days ago: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) assisted in an investigation that led to U.S. District Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington sentencing Enite Alindor, also known as Odette Dureland, to five months in federal prison. The 55-year-old woman was sentenced for making false statements in a matter relating to naturalization and citizenship and for procuring naturalization as a U.S. citizen. As part of her sentence, the court also entered an order de-naturalizing her, thus revoking her July 2012 naturalization as a U.S. citizen. A federal jury had found her guilty on March 1, 2018.
According to court documents, Alindor, a citizen of Haiti, applied for asylum with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Miami in 1997. After the INS denied that application, the United States Immigration Court ordered her to be removed from the United States. Shortly thereafter, Alindor presented herself to the INS as Odettte Dureland and filed for asylum protection under that new identity. She concealed the fact that she had previously applied for status in the United States as Enite Alindor, and she concealed the fact that she was under a final order for removal from the United States. USCIS personnel, unaware of the Alindor identity and order of removal, approved Dureland for citizenship in July 2012, and she was naturalized as a U.S. citizen under that name in July 2012.
Iyman Faris is set to be released from prison in 2020 after serving 17 years behind bars for terrorism-related charges stemming from a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time he gets out, American authorities hope, he will no longer be able to call the U.S. his home.
The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to try to strip the Pakistan-born Faris of his citizenship, which he obtained in 1999, saying it’s an affront to allow him to continue to be an American citizen.
It’s just the type of case authorities say they expect to pursue more frequently under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“The attorney general and the administration are focused on enforcing all immigration laws, especially when it comes to this pinnacle level of citizenship,” said one Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
AG Sessions is holding true to his mission on immigration.
(AP) — The U.S. government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.
Cissna said the cases would be referred to the Department of Justice, whose attorneys could then seek to remove the immigrants’ citizenship in civil court proceedings. In some cases, government attorneys could bring criminal charges related to fraud.
Until now, the agency has pursued cases as they arose but not through a coordinated effort, Cissna said. He said he hopes the agency’s new office in Los Angeles will be running by next year but added that investigating and referring cases for prosecution will likely take longer.
“We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
He declined to say how much the effort would cost but said it would be covered by the agency’s existing budget, which is funded by immigration application fees.
The push comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration and taking steps to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.
Immigrants who become U.S. citizens can vote, serve on juries and obtain security clearance. Denaturalization — the process of removing that citizenship — is very rare.
The U.S. government began looking at potentially fraudulent naturalization cases a decade ago when a border officer detected about 200 people had used different identities to get green cards and citizenship after they were previously issued deportation orders.
In September 2016, an internal watchdog reported that 315,000 old fingerprint records for immigrants who had been deported or had criminal convictions had not been uploaded to a Department of Homeland Security database that is used to check immigrants’ identities. The same report found more than 800 immigrants had been ordered deported under one identity but became U.S. citizens under another.
Since then, the government has been uploading these older fingerprint records dating back to the 1990s and investigators have been evaluating cases for denaturalization.
Earlier this year, a judge revoked the citizenship of an Indian-born New Jersey man named Baljinder Singh after federal authorities accused him of using an alias to avoid deportation.
Authorities said Singh used a different name when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He was ordered deported the next year and a month later applied for asylum using the name Baljinder Singh before marrying an American, getting a green card and naturalizing.
Authorities said Singh did not mention his earlier deportation order when he applied for citizenship.
For many years, most U.S. efforts to strip immigrants of their citizenship focused largely on suspected war criminals who lied on their immigration paperwork, most notably former Nazis.
Toward the end of the Obama administration, officials began reviewing cases stemming from the fingerprints probe but prioritized those of naturalized citizens who had obtained security clearances, for example, to work at the Transportation Security Administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University law school.
The Trump administration has made these investigations a bigger priority, he said. He said he expects cases will focus on deliberate fraud but some naturalized Americans may feel uneasy with the change.
“It is clearly true that we have entered a new chapter when a much larger number of people could feel vulnerable that their naturalization could be reopened,” Chishti said.
Since 1990, the Department of Justice has filed 305 civil denaturalization cases, according to statistics obtained by an immigration attorney in Kansas who has defended immigrants in these cases.
The attorney, Matthew Hoppock, agrees that deportees who lied to get citizenship should face consequences but worries other immigrants who might have made mistakes on their paperwork could get targeted and might not have the money to fight back in court.
Cissna said there are valid reasons why immigrants might be listed under multiple names, noting many Latin American immigrants have more than one surname. He said the U.S. government is not interested in that kind of minor discrepancy but wants to target people who deliberately changed their identities to dupe officials into granting immigration benefits.
“The people who are going to be targeted by this — they know full well who they are because they were ordered removed under a different identity and they intentionally lied about it when they applied for citizenship later on,” Cissna said. “It may be some time before we get to their case, but we’ll get to them.”
Congress knows it needs to amend the CFIUS law, yet no one has proposed any legislation. Complying with CFIUS is optional. All this while China is the largest applicant in the United States for patents and is buying up land in Washington State with nefarious intentions under the guise of farm land operations.
Meawhile –>
Politico: The U.S. government was well aware of China’s aggressive strategy of leveraging private investors to buy up the latest American technology when, early last year, a company called Avatar Integrated Systems showed up at a bankruptcy court in Delaware hoping to buy the California chip-designer ATop Tech.
ATop’s product was potentially groundbreaking — an automated designer capable of making microchips that could power anything from smartphones to high-tech weapons systems. It’s the type of product that a U.S. government report had recently cited as “critical to defense systems and U.S. military strength.” And the source of the money behind the buyer, Avatar, was an eye-opener: Its board chairman and sole officer was a Chinese steel magnate whose Hong Kong-based company was a major shareholder.
Despite those factors, the transaction went through without an assessment by the U.S. government committee that is charged with reviewing acquisitions of sensitive technology by foreign interests.
In fact, a six-month POLITICO investigation found that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the main vehicle for protecting American technology from foreign governments, rarely polices the various new avenues Chinese nationals use to secure access to American technology, such as bankruptcy courts or the foreign venture capital firms that bankroll U.S. tech startups.
The committee, known by its acronym CFIUS, isn’t required to review any deals, relying instead on outsiders or other government agencies to raise questions about the appropriateness of a proposed merger, acquisition or investment. And even if it had a more formal mandate, the committee lacks the resources to deal with increasingly complex cases, which revolve around lines of code and reams of personal data more than physical infrastructure.
“I knew what was critical in 1958 — tanks, airplanes, avionics. Now, truthfully, everything is information. The world is about information, not about things,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who worked with CFIUS while at the Department of Homeland Security during President George W. Bush’s second term. “And that means everything is critical infrastructure. That, in some sense, means CFIUS really should be managing all global trade.”
As a senior official at the Treasury Department, which oversees CFIUS, put it: “Any time we see a company that has lots of data on Americans — health care, personal financial data — that’s a vulnerability.”
When CFIUS was formed, in the 1970s, the companies safeguarding important technology were so large that any takeover attempt by foreigners would be certain to attract attention. Now, much of the cutting-edge technology in the United States is in the hands of much smaller firms, including Silicon Valley startups that are hungry for cash from investors.
The gap in oversight became a more urgent problem in 2015, when China unveiled its “Made in China 2025” strategy of working with private investors to buy overseas tech firms. A year earlier, Chinese investments in U.S. tech startups had totaled $2.3 billion, according to the economic research firm CB Insights. Such investments immediately skyrocketed to $9.9 billion in 2015. These amounts dipped the following year, as the Obama administration voided a high-profile deal, but analysts say China’s appetite to buy U.S. firms and technology is still strong. In 2017, there were 165 Chinese-backed deals closed with American startups, only 12 percent less than the 2015 peak.
Yet the failure to investigate some forms of Chinese investments in American technology has flown under the radar as President Donald Trump goes tit for tat with Beijing, imposing tariffs meant to punish China for unfair trade practices. Critics noted on Monday that Trump’s tentative agreement to drop his tariff threat in exchange for Chinese pledges to purchase billions of dollars more in American goods avoided any mention of the outdated foreign-investment policies that have alarmed lawmakers across the political spectrum.
On the Senate floor Monday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lashed out at Trump’s approach.
“China’s trade negotiators must be laughing themselves all the way back to Beijing,” he said. “They’re playing us for fools — temporary purchase of some goods, while China continues to steal our family jewels, the things that have made America great: the intellectual property, the know-how in the highest end industries. It makes no sense.”
National security specialists insist that such a stealth transfer of technology through China’s investment practices in the United States is a far more serious problem than the tariff dispute — and a problem hiding in plain sight. A recent Pentagon report bluntly declared: “The U.S. does not have a comprehensive policy or the tools to address this massive technology transfer to China.” It went on to warn that Beijing’s acquisition of top-notch American technology is enabling a “strategic competitor to access the crown jewels of U.S. innovation.”
Some congressional leaders concur. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) regularly warns his colleagues that China is using private-sector investments to pilfer American technology. China has “weaponized” its investments in America “in order to vacuum up U.S. industrial capabilities from American companies,” Cornyn said at a January hearing. The goal, he added, is “to turn our own technology and know-how against us in an effort to erase our national security advantage.”
Legislation to expand the CFIUS budget and staff has been moving slowly through the halls of Congress amid pushback from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and business groups. The legislation would give CFIUS new resources to scrutinize bankruptcy purchases and establish stricter scrutiny of start-up investments.
As months passed without any action, and the issue of Chinese investments got overshadowed by tariff fights and feuds between Beijing and the Trump administration, national security experts grew more concerned, fearing that Congress lacked a sense of urgency to police transfers of sensitive technology.
The White House began exploring what more it could do on its own, asking the Treasury Department in late March to offer a list of potential Chinese investment restrictions within 60 days.
Finally, earlier this month, Senate and House leaders announced plans to mark up the bill, starting a process that could lead to passage later this year.
Still, the failure to act more quickly may itself be jeopardizing national security. At a hearing in January, Heath Tarbert, the Treasury Department assistant secretary overseeing CFIUS, testified that allowing foreign countries to invest in U.S. technology without making sufficient background checks “will have a real cost in American lives in any conflict.”
“That is simply unacceptable,” he said.
‘Made in China 2025’
Last October, Chinese President Xi Jinping took the podium before 2,300 Communist Party delegates to deliver his expansive vision for China’s future.
Xi was speaking at the party’s 19th Congress, a summit held every five years to choose the nation’s leaders in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, the expansive theater right off Tiananmen Square. Speaking in front of a giant gold hammer and sickle framed by bright red drapes, Xi held forth for 3½ hours, declaring that China would look outward to solve its problems.
“China will not close its door to the world — we will only become more and more open,” Xi declared to his rapt audience of party leaders, many of them having close ties to the billionaire investors who represent China in the global market. “We will deepen reform of the investment and financing systems, and enable investment to play a crucial role in improving the supply structure.”
China watchers said Xi was alluding to the government’s relatively new economic plan, dubbed “Made in China 2025,” which leaders had unveiled in 2015. The detailed vision shifted the focus on domestic research investments to the need to pump money into — and better understand — foreign markets.
“We will,” the document proclaimed, “guide enterprises to integrate into local culture.”
“We will,” the document continued, “support enterprises to perform mergers, equity investment and venture capital investment overseas.”
At the top of the investment wish list were high-tech industries like artificial intelligence, robotics and space travel.
For the increasingly powerful Chinese leader, it was the culmination of years of efforts to guide how China spends its blossoming wealth. In addition to luring foreign companies to China, Xi wanted the country — which is sitting on several trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves — to start investing abroad.
The plan had “much more money behind it” and “much more coordination” between Beijing and Chinese industrialists than previous economic strategies, according to Scott Kennedy, an expert on Chinese economic policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank that specializes in defense matters.
“And a big component of that is acquiring technology abroad,” he said.
From 2015 to 2017, Chinese venture capitalists pumped money into hot companies like Uber and Airbnb, but also dozens of burgeoning firms with little or no name recognition. The country didn’t just want “trophy assets,” Kennedy explained. China’s leaders wanted to “fill in some of the gaps they have” in China’s tech economy.
While the Asian power has piled up profits from its large manufacturing plants that churn out low-cost products, the Beijing government realized it would face declining productivity unless its economy, from agriculture to manufacturing, adopted high-tech methods. Essentially, China wanted to automate entire industries — including car manufacturing, food production and electronics — and bring the whole process in-house.
So Beijing’s leaders encouraged the country’s cash-rich investors to search for “emerging companies that have technologies that may be extremely important … but aren’t proven,” Kennedy said. The initiative has spawned investments in American startups that work on robotics, energy equipment and next-generation IT. Of particular concern to U.S. national security officials is the semiconductor industry, which makes the microchips that provide the “guts” of many advance technologies that China is seeking to leverage.
“A concerted push by China to reshape the market in its favor, using industrial policies backed by over one hundred billion dollars in government-directed funds, threatens the competitiveness of U.S. industry and the national and global benefits it brings,” declared a January 2017 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, warning of the urgent threat to U.S. superiority in semiconductor technology.
Notably, many of China’s investments didn’t register on the CFIUS radar. They involved the early-seed funding of tech firms in Silicon Valley and low-profile purchases such as the one in Delaware bankruptcy court. They included joint ventures with microchip manufacturers, and the research and development centers created with international partners.
“They have diversified to look for smaller targets,” Kennedy said. “Those things typically do not generate a CFIUS reaction. That is part of it.”
An obscure research body
CFIUS was set up by Congress in 1975 amid growing concerns about oil-rich countries in the Middle East buying up American companies, from energy firms to armsmakers. Chaired by the Treasury Department, the committee brought together representatives from all the major Cabinet agencies to assess the financial, technological and national security threats posed by such investments. For its first decade, however, CFIUS existed mostly as an obscure research body. From 1975 to 1980, the committee met only 10 times, according to congressional reports.
Japan’s economic ascendance in the 1980s changed that. The Defense Department asked CFIUS to step in and investigate potential Japanese purchases of a U.S. steel producer and a company that made ball bearings for the military. In 1988, Congress gave the committee the authority to recommend that the president nix a deal altogether. Still, the committee remained mostly an ad hoc operation into the 1990s.
“Bureaucratically it was not a very smooth, functioning operation,” recalled Steve Grundman, who worked as part of the committee during the Clinton administration. “We had to pick up some intelligence here, some technology assessment there, some industrial analysis hither.”
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress renewed its interest in CFIUS, passing legislation that instructed the committee to consider a deal’s effect on “homeland security” and “critical industries,” a notable change, according to Rosenzweig, the DHS official who worked with CFIUS during the George W. Bush administration. The directive gave the committee a mandate to keep an eye on a wider array of industries, such as hospitals and banks, that DHS considered “critical” to keeping American society operating.
Rosenzweig called it a “singular shift.” Over time, he said, the committee went from reviewing acquisitions of steel companies — involving just two parties and a tangible product — to investigating technically complex purchases of microchip companies and other software or data-rich firms.
“When I first came to CFIUS, the filings from the other side would be a few-page letter about why this was a good deal,” Rosenzweig said. “Now it’s a stack of books that’s up to my knee.”
The committee’s staffing and resources have not kept pace with the growing workload, multiple people who work with CFIUS told POLITICO. While the Treasury Department has been hiring staffers and contractors to help handle the record workload, the committee’s overall resources are subject to the whims of the individual agencies involved in the process, said Stephen Heifetz, who oversaw the CFIUS work at DHS during the second Bush administration.
There is no single budget or staffing figure for CFIUS. Instead, each agency decides the level of personnel and funding it’s willing to commit to the committee. The Treasury Department and DHS have two of the larger CFIUS teams, Heifetz said. During his tenure, Heifetz’s DHS squad included roughly 10 people, split equally between government workers and outside contractors.
“Each agency decides more or less on their own how they’re going to staff it,” Heifetz said.
At Treasury, there are now between 20 and 30 people working for CFIUS, according to a senior department official. But even with the expanded team, the committee is stretched precariously thin. The official described 80-hour workweeks, regular weekend work and no ability to take time off.
“It’s enough to handle the current mandate, but not comfortably,” the official said.
Amid this uncertainty over resources, CFIUS investigations into foreign acquisitions nearly tripled from 2009 to 2015. The most common foreign investor that hits the CFIUS radar is now China. Nearly 20 percent of the committee’s reviews from 2013 to 2015, the most recent data available, involved the Asian power, easily ahead of second-place Canada at just under 13 percent.
Since 2015, the Treasury official said, those trends have only continued: Chinese deals now represent a large plurality of the committee’s work.
The attention appears to be well-founded. In recent years, China has been repeatedly accused of industrial espionage — using indirect means to obtain American software and military secrets, everything from the code that powers wind turbines to the designs that produce the Pentagon’s modern F-35 fighter jets. And several Chinese businessmen have pleaded guilty to participating in complex conspiracies to get their hands on sensitive technical data from U.S. firms and shuttle it back to Beijing. Again and again, high-tech products and military equipment have popped up in China that bear a too-striking resemblance to their American counterparts.
Spurred by these incidents, CFIUS has successfully advised the president to nix Chinese deals at a record clip. In December 2016, President Barack Obama stopped a Chinese investment fund from acquiring the U.S. subsidiary of a German semiconductor manufacturer — only the third time a president had taken such a step at that point. In September 2017, Trump halted a China-backed investor from buying the American semiconductor maker Lattice, citing national security concerns.
Three months later, a Chinese company’s plan to acquire the American money transfer company MoneyGram fell apart when the two sides realized they would likely not get CFIUS approval because of concerns that the personal data of millions of Americans — including military personnel — could fall into the hands of the Chinese military.
Weeks after that, the committee essentially jettisoned a Chinese state-backed group’s attempt to buy Xcerra, a Massachusetts-based tech company that makes equipment to test computer chips and circuit boards. Then, in March, Trump blocked the purchase of the chipmaker Qualcomm by Singapore-based Broadcom Ltd. CFIUS said such a move could weaken Qualcomm, and thereby the United States, as it vies with foreign rivals such as China’s Huawei Technologies to develop the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G.
To national security leaders, though, CFIUS is still only scratching the surface of China’s ambitions to acquire U.S. technology, noting that traditional sale-and-purchase agreements to obtain a U.S. company aren’t the only ways to gain access to cutting-edge technology.
“You can buy a [partial] interest in a company and gain access to the same type of technology,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Congress in October, adding that Justice Department investigators “are really worried about our loss of technology” in instances where Chinese investors buy small stakes in American tech companies.
The U.S. military has raised similar concerns. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned last summer that America is failing to restrict foreign investments in certain types of critical industries, testifying during another hearing that CFIUS is “outdated” and “needs to be updated to deal with today’s situation.”
A mysterious takeover
The case that occurred last summer in an obscure courtroom in Delaware seemed innocuous enough: one relatively small tech firm buying out a bankrupt competitor, a transaction that elicited about as much drama as mailing a letter.
The bankrupt semiconductor maker ATop Tech had only 86 employees when it was declared insolvent. But it had a more than a $1 billion market share of the electronic-design automation and integrated circuits markets, the company told the bankruptcy court, giving it potential value to any player seeking to enter the highly specialized semiconductor industry.
Avatar Integrated Systems, the company seeking to purchase ATop, was apparently such a player. But it was not well known to others in the semiconductor industry, and its precise ownership was a bit of a mystery. The sole director listed on its incorporation papers was a Hong Kong-based businessman named Jingyuan Han, and it issued shares to King Mark International Limited, a Hong Kong company in which Han was an investor. Avatar was set up in March 2017, according to the company.
The transaction went ahead despite concerns raised to the court by other players in the semiconductor industry, as well as those of a former senior Pentagon official who specifically suggested the Chinese government may be backing Avatar.
The former Pentagon official, Joseph Benkert, was enlisted by another American semiconductor company, Synopsys, to help recoup money it was owed by ATop. He warned the court that the deal might have national security risks.
“CFIUS has identified businesses engaged in design and production of semiconductors as presenting possible national security vulnerabilities because they may be useful in defending, or seeking to impair, U.S. national security, as semiconductor design or production may have both commercial or military applications,” Benkert, the former assistant secretary of defense for global affairs under the second Bush administration, wrote to the court.
Benkert argued that the question of Avatar’s ownership needed more review given that the company appeared to be “under the control of Han, a Chinese national.”
“In my opinion,” Benkert wrote, “the proposed transaction is likely to receive thorough CFIUS scrutiny and there is a material risk that it will not receive CFIUS approval.”
But despite those concerns, the deal to buy ATop Tech was not given a formal review by CFIUS, according to a senior administration official with direct knowledge of the process. A Treasury Department official, speaking on behalf of CFIUS, declined to comment on the merger.
An Avatar official, reached at the company office in Santa Clara, California, did not respond to questions or a request for an interview with Han. The company did not respond to multiple requests to discuss its relationship — if any — with the Chinese government or the details of its business.
Han, who has been described in media reports as one of China’s wealthiest men, has spent his career almost entirely in the iron and steel industries. Avatar’s scant history seemed to suggest that it was created for the sole purpose of acquiring an established American semiconductor firm like ATop Tech, according to several former national security officials who still work on CFIUS cases.
Attempts to reach Han through China Oriental Group, the iron and steel company that he runs, were also unsuccessful.
Officials familiar with the CFIUS process say that bankruptcy deals such as the Atop-Avatar case sometimes fall off their radar because of difficulty in discerning whether Chinese investors are working with the government. In other bankruptcy cases, Chinese investment in a potential buyer may not be visible in official filings, especially when a web of holding companies is involved. Thus, say current and former officials working with CFIUS, a significant amount of detective work is necessary to discern both the identity and the intentions of the investors.
Traditionally, courts have defined control of a company as “the ability to direct management to make certain decisions.” But a former Treasury Department official said CFIUS needs to focus on “beneficial ownership,” defined as having the ability to obtain technology from the firm, rather than overall decision-making power.
“It is very hard to find beneficial ownership,” said the official. “Our concern is the capacity of the system to deal with these.”
The bills pending in Congress to strengthen the CFIUS review process include provisions designed to make scrutiny of bankruptcy cases easier. The bills would require CFIUS to “prescribe regulations to clarify that the term ‘covered transaction’ includes any transaction … that arises pursuant to a bankruptcy proceeding or other form of default on debt.”
A sharper focus on bankruptcy cases, particularly in making sure CFIUS scrutinizes investors to ties to foreign governments, is desperately needed, said a former Pentagon official who is still involved in CFIUS cases. “How do they find out about it now? They are reading The Wall Street Journal late at night,” the official said. “It is not a very systematic process.”
The former official also recalled that in the past, the Pentagon has hired an outside contractor to scour around for unreported transactions that might raise some national security flags, such as in the semiconductor or aerospace sectors. Such checks need to be performed in a more systematic way.
“There is no process for surfacing information out of the bankruptcy courts,” the official said.
China goes to Silicon Valley
In Silicon Valley, Chinese investment isn’t typically viewed as a threat, but rather more of a blessing.
Chris Nicholson, co-founder of Skymind, an artificial intelligence company that makes the type of cutting-edge software that both the United States and China covet, recalls the many long months he spent in 2014 trudging up and down Sand Hill Road, the heart of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, and all the doors that slammed shut.
“That was a long, dry year for us,” he told POLITICO.
Nicholson hadn’t sought Chinese money. But then Tencent, China’s internet and telecommunications giant and now one of the world’s largest companies, approached the firm, offering $200,000 in seed funding. The Chinese monetary infusion buoyed Skymind, which soon landed a coveted spot in Y Combinator, the powerful startup accelerator. American investors, who had only months earlier eschewed the firm’s overtures, quickly changed their tune. Chinese investment soon beget American investment.
“It was that crucial piece of Chinese capital that allowed us to survive,” Nicholson said. “That’s all it took. Now we’re a company with 35 employees.”
Reflecting a common feeling among his cohorts in Silicon Valley startups, Nicholson insisted that working with Chinese investors does not mean granting Beijing officials access to the coding process. “My American co-founder and I are in control,” Nicholson said, noting that Skymind has given up none of the rights to its intellectual property and has made its code “open sourced,” which means the code is freely available for cybersecurity experts to inspect, audit and offer suggestions.
But Bryan Ware, CEO of Haystax Technology, which works with law enforcement, defense and intelligence clients on securing their technologies, cast some doubt on the idea that the owners of tech startups would naturally refuse to share details of their technology with their investors: “If you’ve got a Chinese investor and that’s the lifeblood that’s going to allow you to get your product out the door, or allow you to hire your next developer, telling them, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ or, ‘No you shouldn’t do that,’ while you have no other alternatives for financing — that’s just the nature of the dilemma.”
“Every investment comes with a risk of some loss of intellectual property or foreign influence and control,” Ware said.
And too many Silicon Valley deals exist in a “netherworld” between passive investment and absolute takeover, “where there’s access to information, technical information, [and] there is the ability to influence and potentially coerce management,” according to the senior Treasury Department official.
One major concern among specialists like Ware is that Beijing officials could use early Chinese investments in next-generation technology to map the software the federal government and even the Defense Department may one day use — and perhaps even corrupt it in ways that would give China a window into sensitive U.S. information.
A POLITICO review of 185 tech startups with Chinese investors found just over 5 percent had received government contracts, loans or grants ranging from a few thousand dollars to several million dollars. Often, the contracts simply involved research — renewable energy for the Energy Department, electronics and communications equipment for the Pentagon, space technology for NASA. Others ordered lab equipment for the Commerce Department, or machine tools for the military.
“There’s a tremendous amount of intelligence value there,” Ware said. “All governments desire to know what other governments are doing. And knowing the technologies and how they work I think is a big part of that.”
While there’s no indication that the firms had U.S. government contracts at the time that Chinese investors became involved, that may be part of China’s strategy. Derek Scissors, who manages the American Enterprise Institute’s China Global Investment Tracker, an exhaustive database of China’s major global investments, said that as welcome as the surge of Chinese-funded deals may be in Silicon Valley, the engine behind them is the Chinese government. China’s Silicon Valley investment strategy “was shaped by the state and that shaping has gotten tighter,” he said.
Still, many Chinese investments in the United States are not directly backed by the Beijing government, but it can be hard to distinguish.
Some prominent Chinese VC firms in Silicon Valley have clear links to the government. Westlake Ventures, for example, received funding from the government in the coastal Chinese city of Hangzhou, according to media reports and a Pentagon research paper. And Westlake has put money into other VC funds, such as the WI Harper Group, which has a stake in a wide slate of American tech companies, from a dating app to a three-dimensional imaging company to a maker of robot cooks. Westlake did not respond to a request for comment.
But it’s not always easy to trace the money back to a single source, let alone determine what connection that source has to Beijing’s Communist leadership. Haiyin Capital, a Beijing-based VC firm, is partially backed by a state-run Chinese company, according to a company release. Also complex is ZGC Capital Corporation — located in Silicon Valley and focused on providing startups with basic business help — is a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise funded by the Beijing government, according to the organizations’ websites. Attempts to reach each organization were unsuccessful.
Security and economics experts say they are unsure how much financial or national security harm these Chinese investments are actually causing the United States — if any — simply because it may not be clear for years exactly how important the technology may be.
In the meantime, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are blunt: America actually needs Chinese money to maintain its global tech advantage.
“Here’s my warning shot,” Nicholson said. “If we make it difficult for foreign talent and foreign capital to find each other by over-regulating early-stage startup investing … we will lose our supremacy as the top tech economy in the world.”
Enter Congress
In Washington, Silicon Valley’s warning has been heard loudly enough to delay the passage of a bill to strengthen the CFIUS process, despite the support of such bipartisan figures as Cornyn, the second-ranking Senate Republican, and California’s own Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Last year, after a cascade of warnings from the Defense Department, Justice Department and other powerful sources, both the House and Senate seemed ready to take action to strengthen oversight of foreign investment in technology companies.
The bipartisan proposal would direct CFIUS to consider whether pending investments would erode America’s technological edge, enable a foreign government to utilize digital spying powers that might be used against the United States, or give sensitive data — even indirectly — to a foreign government. Similarly, it would expand the definition of “critical industries” — a reference to sectors like banking, defense or energy — to include “critical technologies,” a significant expansion of the committee’s current mandate.
Under the bill, CFIUS would have to create a system to monitor transactions that aren’t voluntarily brought to the committee’s attention.
The measure would also centralize some of the committee’s functions and allow the committee to charge filing fees up to 1 percent of the total value of the transaction up to $300,000, and let Treasury offer a single CFIUS budget request rather than relying on contributions from other departments.
The Trump administration offered a full-throated endorsement of the bill in January, saying it “would strengthen our ability to protect national security and enhance confidence in our longstanding open investment policy.”
And while the bill doesn’t explicitly cite China, the provisions are clearly aimed at limiting its access to the most sensitive areas.
“Any Chinese-related company that is part of our supply chain is a concern to me,” Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-N.C.), a lead House sponsor of the bill, told POLITICO.
Pittenger insisted that Congress’ inaction is allowing China to brazenly pilfer the technology that drives America’s military might, and sell that technology to adversaries like Iran and North Korea. He noted that a Treasury official told him getting the bill signed is the department’s No. 1 legislative priority for 2018.
“We can’t turn a blind eye to this,” Pittenger said.
But many technology entrepreneurs believe the bill would simply drive cutting-edge research overseas. In 2016, foreign investors injected $373 billion into the United States, a figure that has been mostly increasing since the early 2000s, according to government data. Lengthening the CFIUS review time — currently 30 days, but set to extend to 45 days under the new bill — could damage the “brittle process” of early-stage fundraising, said Nicholson, who encouraged lawmakers to focus on expanding CFIUS powers in other areas, such as bankruptcy courts.
“I worry that they’re driving a bulldozer towards a rose garden,” said Nicholson, echoing his claim that training the CFIUS lens on Silicon Valley could scare off the very financing that keeps America growing.
IBM’s vice president for regulatory affairs, Christopher Padilla, agreed, warning at a January hearing that the bill “could constitute the most economically harmful imposition of unilateral trade restrictions by the United States in many decades.”
He raised particular concerns about expanding CFIUS authority to cover foreign investments in “critical technologies,” a phrase tech leaders say is worryingly opaque and that could force companies peddling sensitive technology to have every single sale reviewed.
Padilla called it a “we’ll know it when we see it” approach to regulating that “would be deeply damaging to U.S. competitiveness, and, more important, could lead to a false sense of security.”
Some industry groups have suggested that the bill should delineate these technologies — robotics or artificial intelligence, for instance — to avoid having every deal scrutinized from top to bottom.
“We would be well served to define those issues from the outset,” said Dean Garfield, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group representing industry heavyweights such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter. Garfield said getting the bill revised is a top-five issue for ITI in 2018.
He cautioned that the bill, as written, could spike the number of annual CFIUS reviews from “a few hundred deals” to “a few thousand.”
Proponents, however, feel that specifying specific technologies might be impossible. The software powering the country — from waterways to missile systems — is constantly changing and evolving, they say. Instead, they suggest, new CFIUS funds and a streamlined reporting process would help keep the growing stream of deal reviews moving.
“For the price of a single B-21 bomber, we can fund an updated CFIUS process and protect our key capabilities for several years,” Cornyn said at a hearing. “That is a down payment on long-term national security.”
Nonetheless, lawmakers have been working to address industry complaints, making tweaks to the legislation. And just last week, lawmakers made a breakthrough, agreeing to slightly narrow the bill’s scope, raising the chances the measure will make it to the president’s desk.
The House and Senate are scheduled to mark up their respective CFIUS bills on Tuesday, and lawmakers now are angling to attach the legislation to the annual, must-pass defense authorization bill as a way to guarantee it gets through. But lingering disputes could still derail the process.
National security leaders and lawmakers warn that these squabbles, while reflecting sincerely held positions, are simply delaying necessary action. At that January hearing, Cornyn described a changing reality if CFIUS is left in its current iteration.
“Just imagine if China’s military was stronger, faster and more lethal,” Cornyn said.
“That is what the future likely holds,” he added, “unless we act.”
Primer: Venezuela’s diplomatically isolated president got a show of support from his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan and Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona on Thursday ahead of a weekend election widely decried as unfair.
The United States, the European Union and major Latin American countries have criticized Sunday’s vote in which leftist President Nicolas Maduro is likely to win re-election to a six-year term. More here.
Hundreds protest against ‘fixed’ election in Venezuela: (Reuters) – Several hundred Venezuelan opposition demonstrators blocked traffic in a march to the Organization of American States (OAS) headquarters in Caracas on Wednesday to protest this weekend’s presidential vote, which they say is rigged.
Actually, this is a gesture and for the most part meaningless, because China has first right of ownership and refusal of Venezuela’s oil, however:
President Donald Trump stepped up economic pressure on Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro with an order prohibiting purchases of debts owed to the government, including to the state-run oil company Petroleos de Venezuela.
The executive order, which covers all transactions on any debts owed to the Venezuelan government or state-owned enterprises including accounts receivable, was posted on the Treasury Department website Monday afternoon.
Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the order was intended to restrict the Maduro regime’s ability to liquidate its assets and close off avenues for corruption.
The prohibition on purchases of debts owed to Venezuela specifically includes accounts receivable. One administration official said the action was intended to choke off funding the Maduro regime has been raising by selling off money owed in future to the government and state-owned enterprises in exchange for immediate payment cash.
In response, Maduro expelled U.S. diplomats.
CARACAS (Reuters) – President Nicolas Maduro on Tuesday ordered the expulsion of the top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela in retaliation for a new round of sanctions over Venezuela’s widely-condemned election.
The United States was among a string of countries that did not recognize Sunday’s vote.
The 55-year-old successor to Hugo Chavez won re-election easily, but critics said the vote was riddled with irregularities, from the barring of two popular opposition rivals to the offering of a government “prize” to voters.
President Donald Trump responded with an executive order limiting Venezuela’s ability to sell state assets, heightening pressure on the cash-strapped government.
A press officer for the U.S. embassy in Caracas said she had no immediate comment in response to Maduro’s statements.
Earlier on Tuesday, Venezuela’s foreign ministry called the sanctions “a crime against humanity.” Maduro’s socialist administration, which has long said a U.S.-led “economic war” is to blame for a deep crisis in the OPEC nation, said the new sanctions violated international law.
“Venezuela once again condemns the systematic campaign of aggression and hostility by the U.S. regime to punish the Venezuelan people for exercising their right to vote,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “These arbitrary and unilateral measures constitute a crime against humanity.”
Venezuela’s opposition has accused the Maduro government of behaving immorally and trying to hide shortcomings and corruption behind bombastic rhetoric. The mainstream opposition coalition boycotted Sunday’s vote, calling it a sham aimed at legitimizing Maduro’s rule despite his low popularity.
Among widespread international condemnation of the vote, the European Union said in a statement on Tuesday that the elections did not comply with “minimum international standards for a credible process” and repeated that it would consider the “adoption of appropriate measures.”
The latest U.S. sanctions appeared to target in part Citgo[PDVSAC.UL], a U.S.-based oil refiner owned by Venezuela state oil company PDVSA [PDVSA.UL]. More obstacles to PDVSA’s ability to sell oil abroad could restrict already-dwindling foreign exchange earnings, worsening the economic crisis and pressuring Maduro.
While it only applies to U.S. citizens and residents, a U.S. official told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration has also tried to convince China and Russia to stop issuing new credit to Venezuela. The two have provided billions of dollars in funding for Venezuela in recent years.
But they appeared unlikely to heed the U.S. warnings. Beijing said on Tuesday it believed the United States and Venezuela should resolve their differences via talks, while Moscow said it would not comply with the sanctions.
Accusing U.S. charge d’affaires Todd Robinson of being involved in “a military conspiracy,” Maduro ordered him and another senior diplomat, Brian Naranjo, to leave within 48 hours.
He gave no details of the accusations, but said the U.S. Embassy had been meddling in military, economic and political issues, and vowed to present evidence to the nation shortly.
“Neither with conspiracies nor with sanctions will you hold Venezuela back,” Maduro said, at an event in downtown Caracas at the headquarters of the election board, which is run by government loyalists. Full story here.
al Shabaab has operated as a terror organization in East Africa at least since 2012 and has pledged full allegiance to al Qaeda. The translation for the name, al Shabaab is ‘the youth’ or ‘the youngsters’. That is significant in this case. It operates mostly in Somalia and was known for the attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya.
So, we have this extensive case in Minnesota and carry on luggage on flights leaving the United States out of Seattle, with millions of dollars inside.
MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) – For five months, Fox 9 has been investigating what appears to be rampant fraud in a massive state program.
This fraud is suspected of costing Minnesota taxpayers as much as $100 million a year.
The Fox 9 Investigators reporting is based on public records and nearly a dozen government sources who have direct knowledge of what is happening.
These sources have a deep fear, and there is evidence to support their concerns, that some of that public money is ending up in the hands of terrorists.
SUITCASES FILLED WITH MONEY
This story begins at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where mysterious suitcases filled with cash have become a common carry-on.
On the morning of March 15, Fox 9 chased a tip about a man who was leaving the country. Sources said he took a carry-on bag through security that was packed with $1 million in cash. Travelers can do that, as long as they fill out the proper government forms.
Fox 9 learned that these cloak-and-dagger scenarios now happen almost weekly at MSP. The money is usually headed to the Middle East, Dubai and points beyond. Sources said last year alone, more than $100 million in cash left MSP in carry-on luggage.
The national, go-to expert on what is behind these mysterious money transfers is Glen Kerns.
“What we were interested in is where it was going,” Kerns said.
He is a former Seattle police detective who spent 15 years on the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, until his retirement.
“It’s an outright crime, it’s unbelievable,” he said.
Kerns tracked millions of dollars in cash that was leaving on flights from Seattle.
It was coming from Hawalas, businesses used to courier money to countries that have no official banking system.
Some immigrant communities rely on Hawalas to send funds to help impoverished relatives back home.
Kerns discovered some of the money was being funneled to a Hawala in the region of Somalia that is controlled by the al Shabaab terrorist group.
“I talked to a couple of sources who had lived in that region and I said, ‘If money is going to this Hawala do you think it is going to al Shabaab?'” said Kerns. “And he said, ‘Oh definitely, that area is controlled by al Shabaab, and they control the Hawala there.’”
He said when the money arrives, whether it was intended for legitimate purposes or not, al Shabaab or other groups demand a cut.
As Kerns dug deeper, he found that some of the individuals who were sending out tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of remittance payments happened to be on government assistance in this country.
How could they possibly come up with such big bucks to transfer back home?
“We had sources that told us, ‘It’s welfare fraud, it’s all about the daycare,’” said Kerns.
FOX 9 REPORTED ON THE FRAUD FIVE YEARS AGO
To better understand the connection between daycare fraud and the surge in carry-on cash, you have to look at the history of this crime.
Five years ago the Fox 9 Investigators were first to report that daycare fraud was on the rise in Minnesota, exposing how some businesses were gaming the system to steal millions in government subsidies meant to help low-income families with their childcare expenses.
“It’s a great way to make some money,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said.
In order for the scheme to work, the daycare centers need to sign up low income families that qualify for child care assistance funding.
Surveillance videos from a case prosecuted by Hennepin County show parents checking their kids into a center, only to leave with them a few minutes later. Sometimes, no children would show up.
Either way, the center would bill the state for a full day of childcare.
Video from that same case shows a man handing out envelopes of what are believed to be kickback payments to parents who are in on the fraud.
When asked where the money was going, Freeman said, “I don’t know exactly where it went. But it adds up when you begin to look at how many people were involved.”
FOZIA ALI
One recent federal case points to at least some of the money going overseas.
Fox 9 obtained video of Fozia Ali being sworn in as a member of the city of Hopkins Park Board.
“I will support the constitution of the United States,” she said.
As she was taking her oath of office, she was also under investigation for wire fraud and theft of public money.
“So help me God,” she said during the ceremony.
State and federal agents had already raided Ali’s daycare center in south Minneapolis. The business was suspected of billing the government for more than a million dollars’ worth of bogus childcare services.
“We found records that she was collecting a significant amount of money for a much larger number of children than were actually attending the center,” said Craig Lisher from the FBI. “We are aware that some of the funds went overseas, what she was cashing out, money from the business.”
When asked if he had any idea of what it was going for he said, “I can’t say.” When pressed if he can’t say or doesn’t know he responded, “I can’t say.”
Investigators analyzed Ali’s cell phone to track her activities.
She took a two-month trip from Minnesota to Dubai and then Kenya, staying at times in $800 a night hotel rooms.
She used an app on her phone to bill the state of Minnesota for childcare services while she was out of the country.
Ali pled guilty to the daycare fraud and in March started serving time in a federal prison. She declined Fox 9’s request for an interview.
10 DAYCARES UNDER ACTIVE INVESTIGATION
“We believe that there’s a scope of fraud out there that we really need to get our arms around and ensure that those dollars are going to kids that really need them,” Acting Commissioner for the Department of Human Services Chuck Johnson said.
He told the Fox 9 Investigators his agency has 10 daycares currently under active investigation for fraud.
Fox 9 has learned dozens more are considered suspicious.
Search warrants obtained by the Fox 9 Investigators show each one of the suspect centers has received several million dollars in childcare assistance funds.
According to public records and government sources, most are owned by Somali immigrants.
When asked if the Department of Human Services has any evidence to suggest this looks like organized crime, Johnson responded, “There’s a common pattern in how a lot of these are carried out, but beyond that, not something that I would directly categorize as organized crime.”
Sources in the Somali community told Fox 9 it is an open secret that starting a daycare center is a license to make money.
The fraud is so widespread they said, that people buy shares of daycare businesses to get a cut of the huge public subsidies that are pouring in.
Government insiders believe this scam is costing the state at least a hundred million dollars a year, half of all child care subsidies.
“I don’t think half sounds credible,” Johnson said. “I certainly think that some of the schemes that we’re seeing and certainly the ones that we’ve brought forward already for prosecution involve millions of dollars. I mean this is not a small scale that we’re looking at.”
TRACKING THE MONEY?
Minnesota started aggressively going after daycare fraud in 2014. Back then, it was easier to track the flow of money.
The state would pay a daycare’s bill and within hours of the money showing up in the business’s bank account, funds were being wired to the United Arab Emirates.
Those wire transfers stopped after a few centers were busted.
Which brings us back to those mysterious suitcases at Minneapolis-St. Paul International.
In 2015, investigators documented $14 million in carry on cash. By 2016, it had mushroomed to $84 million. Then last year, $100 million.
A trend all too familiar to former terrorism investigator Glen Kerns.
Fox 9 asked him how likely it is that some of the money is going towards terrorism?
“I say absolutely, our sources tell us that. Good sources, from the community leaders,” he said. “My personal opinion is we need a nationwide task force to clamp down on this type of fraud.”
This crime is spreading. Sources tell Fox 9 fraudsters in other states are now using the Minnesota playbook to rip off millions of public dollars meant to help kids.
*** Where was the FBI, the Minnesota governor, DHS?
(KMSP) – A government whistleblower said he warned upper management at the Department of Human Services about massive daycare fraud more than a year ago.
Emails obtained by the Fox 9 Investigators show the Minnesota government agency was told millions of stolen tax dollars were going overseas and likely a portion of the money was being skimmed by terrorism organizations.
Scott Stillman spent eight years managing the state’s digital forensics lab, meaning he mined data from computers and smart phones.
“I have never seen anything like this level or scope in my 27-year career as an investigator,” he told Fox 9.
When the state started going after daycare centers suspected of fraud, Stillman was directly involved in the investigations.
Some of the businesses were gaming the system to steal millions in government subsidies meant to help low-income families with their childcare expenses.
In many of the cases, parents would check in their children at a daycare, only to leave a few minutes later with the kids and sometimes no children would show up at the center. However, it would still bill the state for a full day of childcare.
Stillman was so alarmed by what he found that in March of 2017 he fired off a series of emails to his supervisors at DHS.
“We are working on and overwhelmed by a significant amount of fraud cases involving organized crime, defrauding hundreds of millions of dollars annually in taxpayer monies,” he wrote.
Stillman read from one of the emails he wrote which the Fox 9 Investigators obtained through a public records request.
DHS took two months before it turned over the emails, and much of what it provided was redacted.
“They were not easy to write,” he said. “But I felt I had an obligation because I think there’s a strong possibility this money is being used against innocent civilians and against our military.”
According to Stillman, he alerted a number of people in DHS including the Commissioner’s Chief of Staff with the following message: “Significant amount of these defrauded dollars are being sent overseas to countries and organizations connected to entities known to fund terrorists and terrorism.”
At a Monday press briefing, the governor told Fox 9 his office was not told about the warnings.
Sources tell the Fox 9 Investigators people within the governor’s office were told about the concerns a couple of years ago.
“My chief of staff, current and previous staff, from what I’m told, did not get any information alleging there was that kind of theft,” Dayton said.
The state currently has 10 daycare centers under investigation for fraudulent billing of childcare services.
Each of the suspect centers has received several millions of dollars in government subsidies.
According to public records and government sources, Somali immigrants own most of the daycare centers.
Fox 9 asked the Department of Human Services about the emails Stillman sent in 2017 and more specifically who, in the chain of command, was aware of them and when.
DHS responded with a statement: “The Deputy Commissioner, communications and legal staff learned there may be emails on this subject when Fox 9 made its data request in March. The then-chief compliance officer was informed at the time the emails were originally sent.”
“I would like to have an independent federal investigation of the handling of DHS programs, specifically daycares and the Medicaid fraud program by Homeland Security of the Department of Justice.”
Stillman is no longer with the state. He resigned from his position in March after 10 years on the job.