If the alleged madam of a prostitution-front Florida massage parlor is indeed selling the Chinese access to the president, one intelligence expert noted, the story could be as dangerous as it is lascivious.
On Saturday, Mother Jones reported that Li "Cindy" Yang, the massage parlor's founder who was photographed with Donald Trump and other GOP figures, also runs "an investment business that has offered to sell Chinese clients access to Trump and his family."
"If the president of the United States is letting a Chinese madam sell access at Mar-a-Lago to Chinese business people while his friends are getting serviced at businesses she started, he is making himself and the country vulnerable to massive blackmail risk," David Rothkopf, a Carnegie-endowed intelligence and national security expert, wrote in the Daily Beast following the bombshell report.
If true, the practice is "a textbook story of how foreign actors gain leverage over senior officials," he added.
Though it would be easy to overlook the seriousness of the claims in the Mother Jones report authored by David Corn, Dan Friedman and Daniel Schulman, Rothkopf noted, one must resist the temptation to do so.
"If the Steele dossier had contained speculation that the president and his family were giving access to a Chinese woman who runs a string of sex spas where rich, powerful friends of the president were getting sexual services," he mused, "would it have been any less shocking or disturbing than alleged stories about golden showers with Russian hookers?"
Rothkopf added that this story could potentially be even more damaging than the allegations in the infamous Steele dossier because the corruption "continued long after Trump became president and was easily documented."
"This case deserves further investigation by the FBI and perhaps Congressional investigators," Rothkopf concluded. "But, the story of Cindy Yang and her profitable venture in Trumpworld, based on what we know today, without an additional fact coming to light, underscores yet again both how unfit the president is for office and how his business practices and associations have created a national security risk for the United States. "