The same mysterious person who’s been sending information on Jimmy Lai to various media outlets has leaked more emails from Lai’s top aide, Mark Simon. Simon apparently contacted Palin’s senior advisor, Meghan Stapleton, in order to set up a meeting between Lai and Palin when she graced the city with her presence in September 2009. Lai is a Hong Kong mogul who owns Apple Daily’s parent company (Next Media) and Giordano.
Apparently Simon wrote in the email to Stapleton that pan-democrats “need some attention and gain a level of protection by government knowing they can get some international attention”, reports the SCMP.
But when Palin’s people didn’t reply, Simon tried again with John McCain’s foreign affairs adviser, Randy Scheunemann, telling him how Palin should approach the Hong Kong media, which he was “certain” was going to be “very hostile”.
He then goes on to pooh-pooh a whole bunch of media outlets, calling the SCMP “bad news” and saying that “CNN International are commies”. He also pointed out that Tom Mitchell, the Financial Times’ Beijing correspondent, “wore an Obama button” during the American presidential campaigns. However, according to Simon, the WSJ editorial page, CNBC and “even” CCTV are okay “as they are not out to get [Palin]”.
The meeting never happened.
According to the SCMP the leaker of the emails said there was evidence of Lai’s “close ties with US right-wing politicians”. Other emails showed that Lai joined the American consul-general to Hong Kong on a boat trip in June 2008, and that Lai had travelled to Myanmar with former World Bank president and former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz in 2012 and 2013.
In 2011, when Lai’s leaked financial records revealed donations he made to pro-democracy organisations (man, that guy’s got to work on his computer security), Simon told the Washington Post that he had an “extremely unpleasant” role as “the ice sculpture in the middle of a big propaganda buffet”.
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia
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