Excerpt from RED HANDED. The numbers are footnotes.

Posted on: February 9, 2022 at 13:23:49 CT

Lenovo’s plans triggered a federal government review of the transaction. (Recall that Feinstein sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time.) By March 2005, the government approved the deal, and within days, Lenovo announced that it had received a $350 million investment from three U.S. private equity firms, including Blum’s Newbridge Capital.62 In a 2009 interview, Richard Blum claimed that IBM had approached his firm because they wanted an American partner to be part of the new ownership group.63 Lenovo, with Senator Feinstein’s husband a major owner, would a few years later be accused by U.S. officials of placing spyware on computers sold to the United States military.

In 2010, Lee Chieffalo, who managed computer operations centers for the U.S. Marines in Iraq, testified in court: “A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the US military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China. . . . That was a huge security breach. We don’t have any idea how much data they got, but we had to take all those systems off the network.”64 Blum sold his stake in Lenovo in 2011.

A few months after the Lenovo deal, Feinstein and Blum again traveled to Shanghai, along with San Francisco’s then mayor Gavin Newsom, whom she introduced to Jiang.65 Feinstein’s problematic entanglements with Beijing go beyond her personal relationships with Chinese leaders and her husband’s deep commercial ties.

With Feinstein as a member of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, an alleged Chinese spy emerged on her staff.