Justice Dept. Aims To Block Taiwan In Spy Probe

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The Justice Department is urging a federal judge to block an unusual attempt by Taiwan to prevent the use of its diplomatic cables in the prosecution of a Virginia man who was one of the State Department’s top Asia experts.

The American diplomat, Donald Keyser, admitted last year to having thousands of classified documents at his home and failing to report his intimate relationship with a Taiwanese intelligence agent, Isabelle Cheng.

After the FBI confronted Keyser, Ms. Cheng, and her boss at a Washington-area restaurant in 2004, Ms. Cheng provided American investigators with cables, e-mail messages, and other documents about her dealings with Keyser.

The Taiwanese mission filed a court motion in August demanding the return of the records, as well as an order barring the use of the information by American officials. The Taiwanese claim the taking of the records violated promises of diplomatic immunity in a 1980 accord on relations between the two countries. America does not officially recognize Taiwan, whose presence here is known euphemistically as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.

In a court filing yesterday, prosecutors said they were willing to give Taiwan copies of all of the allegedly seized records. However, the government said it “objects to returning the original documents provided by Cheng to the FBI because they might constitute evidence in a criminal trial.” Prosecutors also said the papers had been distributed to various American intelligence agencies and retrieving them would be “impracticable.”

Prosecutors contend Taiwan waited too long to file a legal objection over the document removal, though they conceded that the State Department fielded two protests from the island’s diplomats.

Taiwan’s unusual legal maneuver, which its attorneys sought to keep secret, was first reported last week by The New York Sun.

A former legal adviser to the State Department, Abraham Sofaer, said Taiwan might have the legal right to the return of its documents. “If we had an embassy and an embassy employee took stuff out of an embassy and took it to somebody, we would want to be able to get it back,” the lawyer told the Sun. “We’d still have the right to get it back. … You can’t have a waiver of sovereign immunity by that kind of conduct.”

Keyser pleaded guilty to three felonies last year, but prosecutors, who claim he has failed to cooperate with the investigation, are seeking to bring new espionage-related charges against him. His lawyers are fighting the move and insist he has cooperated fully.


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