Tag Archives: National Security

Restoring Border Protection and National Security: ICE raids in Denver arrest 50 gang members of Tren de Aragua

CBN SCREENSHOT-DEA Crackdown

Important Takeaways:

  • A record number of arrests – more than 1,100 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials – took place Monday as the Trump administration ramps up ICE sweeps from coast to coast.
  • In Denver, agents raided a nightclub detaining around 50 people the DEA says were associated with the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. President Trump hailed the raids at a House GOP retreat Monday evening.
  • “We’re tracking down the illegal alien criminals. We’re detaining them and we are throwing them the h*** out of our country. We have no apologies and we’re moving forward very fast,” Trump said.
  • Military flights are taking deportees back to their home countries; and while agents are targeting violent offenders, officials say, they’re not stopping there. ICE Field Director Garrett Ripa said, “Case by case basis we make a discretionary call on every call that we arrest whether that’s a criminal or not a criminal. We’re going to take enforcement action on every individual.”

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Security clearance removed: John Bolton’s tell-all book ‘rife with sensitive information’ damaged national security

Important Takeaways:

  • Trump on Monday evening signed an executive order that read:
    • National security is also damaged by the publication of classified information. Former National Security Advisor John R. Bolton published a memoir for monetary gain after he was terminated from his White House position in 2019. The book was rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government. The memoir’s reckless treatment of sensitive information undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff. Publication also created a grave risk that classified material was publicly exposed.
    • To remedy these abuses of the public trust, this Order directs the revocation of any active or current security clearances held by: (i) the former intelligence officials who engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign; and (ii) John R. Bolton.
  • Trump also revoked the security clearances of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation — which was used as justification to suppress reports about it just days before the 2020 presidential election.
  • Bolton served as Trump’s third national security adviser, after Gen. (Ret.) Mike Flynn and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster.

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U.S. Farmland for sale; Foreign entities own 40 million acres with China owning 347,000 acres

China-owns-US-farmland-map

Important Takeaways:

  • The upcoming House Farm Bill will contain measures to restrict foreign entities like China from scooping up American farmland in a big win for national security, a Republican who helped secure the provisions told DailyMail.com.
  • Foreign entities own a total of 40 million acres of U.S. farmland and China has bought up nearly 347,000 acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
  • Now lawmakers are working to further restrict China and other adversaries from snatching up coveted land in the fiscal year 2024 ‘Farm Bill.’
  • The Chinese land purchases near important U.S. military instillations have been a particular concern for lawmakers and government officials.
  • In 2022, for example, the China-based food producer, Fufeng Group, acquired 300 acres of land in Grand Forks, just 20 minutes down the road from the Grand Forks Air Force Base, where some of the nation’s most sensitive drone technology is based.
  • Chairman of the committee, Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., celebrated the bill’s passage through committee with bipartisan support, saying in a statement last week, ‘Great things can be accomplished when you don’t surround yourself with redlines, and I am eager to continue our work with whomever wants to come to the table.’
  • Hinson also celebrated the bill’s committee approval.
  • ‘I was proud to work with Chairman Thompson to ensure initiatives to reshore our food supply chain and prevent Communist China from buying our land were included in the House Farm Bill.’
  • ‘Food security is national security, and this Farm Bill bolsters both.’

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The world is watching: America plays poisonous politics

Important Takeaways:

  • Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy
  • Ambassadors to Washington warn that the GOP-Democratic divide is endangering America’s national security.
  • When I [Nahal Toosi] asked the European ambassador to talk to me about America’s deepening partisan divide, I expected a polite brushoff at best. Foreign diplomats are usually loath to discuss domestic U.S. politics.
  • Instead, the ambassador unloaded for an hour, warning that America’s poisonous politics are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability.
  • The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the envoy mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every [blank] day.”
  • For example, one former Arab ambassador who was posted in the U.S. during both Republican and Democratic administrations told me American politics have become so unhealthy that he’d turn down a chance to return.
  • “I don’t know if in the coming years people will be looking at the United States as a model for democracy,” a second Arab diplomat warned.
  • Donald Trump’s name came up in my conversations, but not as often as you’d think.
  • The diplomats focused much of their alarm on the U.S. debate over military aid to Ukraine
  • In particular, they criticized the decision to connect the issue of Ukrainian aid and Israeli aid to U.S. border security. Not only did the move tangle a foreign policy issue with a largely domestic one, but border security and immigration also are topics about which the partisan fever runs unusually high, making it harder to get a deal. Immigration issues in particular are a problem many U.S. lawmakers have little incentive to actually solve because it robs them of a rallying cry on the campaign trail.
  • So now, “Ukraine might not get aid, Israel might not get aid, because of pure polarization politics”

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Former U.S. Officials held secret talks with Russians about ending war

Secret talks with Russia

Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

  • A group of former senior U.S. national security officials have held secret talks with prominent Russians believed to be close to the Kremlin — and, in at least one case, with the country’s top diplomat — with the aim of laying the groundwork for potential negotiations to end the war in Ukraine
  • In a high-level example of the back-channel diplomacy taking place behind the scenes, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with members of the group for several hours in April in New York, four former officials and two current officials told NBC News.
  • Among the goals, they said, is to keep channels of communication with Russia open where possible and to feel out where there might be room for future negotiation, compromise and diplomacy over ending the war.
  • The talks come amid mounting signs that the U.S. and its allies are eager to see Moscow and Kyiv move toward peace talks in the fall, after the completion of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive.

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U.S. puts Chinese firms helping military on trade blacklist

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Commerce Department put a dozen Chinese companies on its trade blacklist on Wednesday citing national security concerns and in some cases their help with the Chinese military’s quantum computing efforts.

The department also said 16 entities and individuals from China and Pakistan were added to the blacklist for contributing to Pakistan’s nuclear activities or ballistic missile program.

In total, 27 new entities were added to the list from China, Japan, Pakistan, and Singapore.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement that the move will help prevent U.S. technology from supporting the development of Chinese and Russian “military advancement and activities of non-proliferation concern like Pakistan’s unsafeguarded nuclear activities or ballistic missile program.”

The Commerce Department said Hangzhou Zhongke Microelectronics Co. Ltd., Hunan Goke Microelectronics, New H3C Semiconductor Technologies Co. Ltd., Xi’an Aerospace Huaxun Technology, and Yunchip Microelectronics were placed on the Commerce Department’s entity list for their “support of the military modernization of the People’s Liberation Army.”

It also added Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, QuantumCTek, and Shanghai QuantumCTeck Co. Ltd. to the list for “acquiring and attempting to acquire U.S.-origin items in support of military applications.”

Suppliers to these companies will need to apply for a license before selling to them, which is likely to be denied.

(Reporting by Chris Sanders and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Clarke)

Islamic State in Afghanistan could be able to attack U.S. in 6 months-Pentagon official

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Islamic State in Afghanistan could have the capability to attack the United States in as little as six months, and has the intention to do so, a senior Pentagon official told Congress on Tuesday.

The remarks by Colin Kahl, under secretary of defense for policy, are the latest reminder that Afghanistan could still pose serious national security concerns for the United States even after it ended its two-decade-old war in defeat in August.

The Taliban, which won the war, are enemies of Islamic State and have seen its attempts to impose law and order after the U.S. pullout thwarted by suicide bombings and other attacks claimed by Islamic State.

They include bombings targeting the minority Shi’ite sect and even an Islamic State beheading of a member of a Taliban militia force in the eastern city of Jalalabad.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kahl said it was still unclear whether the Taliban has the ability to fight Islamic State effectively following the U.S. withdrawal in August. The United States fought the Taliban as well as striking groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda.

“It is our assessment that the Taliban and ISIS-K are mortal enemies. So the Taliban is highly motivated to go after ISIS-K. Their ability to do so, I think, is to be determined,” Kahl said, using an acronym for Islamic State in Afghanistan.

Kahl estimated Islamic State had a “cadre of a few thousand” fighters. Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi of the new Taliban government has said the threat from Islamic State militants will be addressed. He also said Afghanistan would not become a base for attacks on other countries.

Kahl suggested al Qaeda in Afghanistan posed a more complex problem, given its ties to the Taliban. It was those ties that triggered the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 following al Qaeda’s Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban had harbored al Qaeda leaders.

Kahl said it could take al Qaeda “a year or two” to regenerate the capability to carry out attacks outside of Afghanistan against the United States.

Democratic President Joe Biden, whose supervision of the chaotic end to the war last summer has damaged his approval ratings, has said the United States will continue to be vigilant against threats emanating from Afghanistan by carrying out intelligence-gathering operations in the country that would identify threats from groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State.

Kahl said the goal was to disrupt those groups so that Islamic State and al Qaeda don’t become capable of striking the United States.

“We need to be vigilant in disrupting that,” he said.

Still, U.S. officials privately warn that identifying and disrupting groups like al Qaeda and Islamic State is extremely difficult without any troops in the country. Drones capable of striking Islamic State and al Qaeda targets are being flown in from the Gulf.

Kahl said the United States did not yet have any agreement with countries neighboring Afghanistan to host troops for counterterrorism efforts.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

UK should be concerned at Chinese gene data harvesting, lawmaker says

By Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) -Britain should be concerned about the harvesting of genetic data from millions of women by a Chinese company through prenatal tests, a senior British lawmaker told Reuters.

A Reuters review of scientific papers and company statements found that BGI Group developed the tests in collaboration with the Chinese military and is using them to collect genetic data around the world for research on the traits of populations.

“I’m always concerned when data leaves the United Kingdom, that it should be treated with the respect and privacy that we would expect here at home, and the concern that this raises is that it may not be so,” Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told Reuters.

“The connections between Chinese genomics firms and the Chinese military do not align with what we would normally expect in the United Kingdom or indeed many other countries.”

The privacy policy on the website for the Non-Invasive Prenatal Test (NIPT), sold under the brand name NIFTY in Britain, says data collected can be shared when it is “directly relevant to national security or national defense security” in China.

BGI says it has never shared data for national security purposes and has never been asked to.

The company said that it fully complied with European GDPR data protection rules and also had the British certification for personal information management.

“BGI’s NIPT test was developed solely by BGI – not in partnership with China’s military. All NIPT data collected overseas are stored in BGI’s labs in Hong Kong and are destroyed after five years,” it said in an email to Reuters, adding that it took data protection, privacy and ethics extremely seriously.

Tugendhat is one of nine British lawmakers who has been sanctioned by China for highlighting alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which Beijing describes as “lies and disinformation.”

He co-leads the China Research Group, a group of Conservative lawmakers which looks to rebalance the strategic relationship with China.

He said that any British companies using the tests should be clear where the data is going, who holds it, and what access others, including other governments, would have to it.

“Unless a company has done that, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for British people to be extremely concerned with these connections,” he said.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout in London, additional reporting by Kirsty Needham in Sydney; Editing by Kate Holton and Pravin Char)

Mexico vows purge after ex-defense chief arrested in U.S.

By Diego Oré and Frank Jack Daniel

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s president on Friday promised to clean up the armed forces but backed its current leadership after the arrest of a former defense minister on U.S drug charges, which he called evidence some of his predecessors were “mafiosi.”

The stunning detention in Los Angeles of Salvador Cienfuegos, defense minister until 2018, took Mexico’s security establishment by surprise, senior federal sources said. U.S. authorities did not warn their counterparts of the operation.

The fall of Cienfuegos marks the first time a former defense minister has been arrested, and will have far reaching implications for Mexico’s drug war, which has been led by the armed forces for more than a decade.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged to suspend anyone inside his government implicated in the charges

“We won’t cover up for anybody,” he said, before voicing fulsome support for Cienfuegos’ successor at the head of the army and his counterpart in the navy, noting that he had personally vetted them for honesty.

Under Lopez Obrador, the armed forces have taken on more responsibility, including establishing a militarized national police force, overseeing port security and working on infrastructure projects.

The arrest comes less than three weeks before the U.S. presidential election. President Donald Trump, seeking a second term, has made clamping down on drug cartels a priority, though without major progress since he took office in 2017.

Some Mexican officials were privately shocked at the detention of Cienfuegos in Los Angeles airport, worrying it was an unprecedented U.S. intervention against a symbol of Mexican national security.

“It was totally unexpected, I never saw this coming, never, never,” said a senior police source.

Lopez Obrador quickly incorporated the arrest into his narrative that predecessors had presided over a debilitating increase in corruption in Mexico, which for years has been convulsed by often horrific levels of drug gang violence.

“If we’re not talking about a narco state, one can certainly talk about a narco government, and without doubt, about a government of mafiosi,” Lopez Obrador said.

“We’re cleaning up, purifying public life.”

‘WE’RE CLEANING UP’

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said he had received word from the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles that Cienfuegos, 72, was facing five counts of drug charges and would be transferred from Los Angeles to New York. Sources earlier told Reuters that one of the charges related to money laundering.

Lopez Obrador said he only heard about the arrest after the event, though he noted that Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena, had informed him about two weeks ago that there was talk of an investigation involving Cienfuegos.

There had been no open probe in Mexico on Cienfuegos and his arrest was linked to the case against Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s security minister from 2006-2012, who Lopez Obrador said.

Garcia Luna is on trial in New York charged with accepting millions of dollars in bribes from captured kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, which he was meant to fight.

Like Garcia Luna, Cienfuegos had been a major figure in Mexico’s drug war, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives over the past two decades.

Under Cienfuegos, the army was accused of extrajudicial killings, including the June 2014 Tlatlaya massacre in central Mexico, where 22 drug gang members were shot dead.

A tall, imposing man, Cienfuegos fought to shield the army from potentially embarrassing investigations.

They included the kidnapping and suspected massacre of 43 student teachers in September 2014 in the city of Iguala by drug gang members in cahoots with corrupt police. Last month arrest warrants were issued in Mexico for soldiers linked to the case.

Mexico’s armed forces are generally perceived as less prone to corruption than the police. However, that image has been gradually corroded since former president Felipe Calderon first sent in the military to fight the gangs at the end of 2006.

(Reporting by Dave Graham, Diego Oré, Frank Jack Daniel and Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Dave Graham; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and Tom Brown)

Senate committee to vote on bill banning federal employees from using TikTok

By Nandita Bose

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Senate committee is likely to vote next week on a bill from Republican Senator Josh Hawley that would ban federal employees from using social media app TikTok on government-issued devices.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will take up the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act” at its hearing on July 22.

TikTok’s Chinese ownership and wide popularity among American teens have brought scrutiny from U.S. regulators and lawmakers.

TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, is known for its ability to create short videos. The company last year said that about 60% of its 26.5 million monthly active users in the U.S. are aged 16 to 24.

One of the company’s harshest critic, Hawley has repeatedly raised national security concerns over TikTok’s handling of user data and said he was worried that the company shares data with the Chinese government.

“For federal employees it really is a no-brainer. It’s a major security risk. … Do we really want Beijing having geo-location data of all federal employees? Do we really want them having their keystrokes?” Hawley told reporters in March when he announced the introduction of the bill.

Several U.S. agencies that deal with national security and intelligence issues have banned employees from using the app, which allows users to create short videos.

Recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is looking at banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok, suggesting it shared information with the Chinese government. He said Americans should be cautious in using the app.

TikTok in the past has told Reuters it has never provided user data to China. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under a law introduced in 2017 under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Chinese companies have an obligation to support and cooperate in China’s national intelligence work.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler)