Comment by tptacek
3 days ago
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
3 days ago
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, and as outright fascism flourishes, you might not even manage the former. When you spend years in an ICE gulag because your speech crosses some nebulous line, it will matter very little what legal rights you think you have.
The question isn't whether you can beat the ride. It's whether you can beat the rap.
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
You can't plausibly be arrested by ICE if you're in the US legally, in theory, but look where we are.
I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.
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