So how do you prepare for a road trip? Make a checklist? Toothbrush. Razor. Whatever pills you've been taking. Phone and laptop chargers. Lee Child novel. And of course...

...Chinese passports and a flash drive containing malware late last month, had a signal detector, other electronic devices and thousands of dollars in cash in her hotel room...multiple electronic devices in her hotel room, including a signal detector that can seek out and detect hidden cameras, another cell phone, nine USB drives and five SIM cards. There were also several credit cards in her name in the room--at the upscale Colony Hotel a block from the beach. She also had more than $8,000 in US and Chinese currency, with $7,500 of it in $100 bills.

According to the Secret Service, via CNN, this was what a Chinese woman named Yujing Zhang carried into Mar-a-Lago over the weekend. Mar-a-Lago, of course, is the Winter Emolument of the President* of the United States. Zhang also was toting along an attitude and a couple of bullshit stories along with her own personal Best Buy outlet. From the AP:

Yujing Zhang, 32, approached a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint outside the Palm Beach club early Saturday afternoon and said she was a member who wanted to use the pool, court documents said. She showed the passports as identification. Agents say she wasn’t on the membership list, but a club manager thought Zhang was the daughter of a member. Agents say that when they asked Zhang if the member was her father, she did not answer definitively but they thought it might be a language barrier and admitted her.

Zhang’s story changed when she got inside, agents say, telling a front desk receptionist she was there to attend the United Nations Chinese American Association event scheduled for that evening. No such event was scheduled and agents were summoned.

A Secret Service agent looks on as Trump approaches Marine One ahead of a flight to Mar-a-Lago. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

Agent Samuel Ivanovich wrote in court documents that Zhang told him that she was there for the Chinese American event and had come early to familiarize herself with the club and take photos, again contradicting what she had said at the checkpoint. She showed him an invitation in Chinese that he could not read. He said Zhang was taken off the grounds and told she could not be there. Ivanovich said she became argumentative, so she was taken to the local Secret Service office for questioning.

Rules For Gracious Living: while carrying a couple of pounds of spy gear and thousands of dollars of cash around a presidential* residence, don't mouth off to the Secret Service. Of course, the Secret Service seems to have been going walkabout on the whole business.

For instance, a Secret Service agent who spoke Mandarin was called in to help with translations hours into Zhang's questioning. Adler also had Ivanovich admit that the agency that protects the President largely relied on Mar-a-Lago staff to determine whether to admit Zhang, didn't see red flags in the devices she carried when they showed up at a metal detector checkpoint inside the club, and asked no further questions of Zhang when she first arrived once they believed she was related to another club member with the same last name. Adler pointed out her name was extremely common in China--one of the three most common last names in the country.



Zhang talked her way into the club, carrying a large number of electronic devices including malware on a thumbdrive. At first, she told a special agent at Mar-a-Lago she wanted to visit the pool at the beach club--even though she wore a long gray dress and had no bathing suit. The Mar-a-Lago beach club manager then noted her last name matched that of a club member, and the club waved her in, believing her to be the club member's daughter, and "due to a potential language barrier issue," authorities wrote in her criminal complaint. A golf cart shuttle driver then took her to the club's main reception area, where Zhang told a Secret Service agent she sought to attend a "United Nations Friendship Event" on the premises.



"Hey, Secret Service! Your shoe's untied!"

They also did a thing that can safely be called Not Smart.



Ivanovich, being questioned about the malware allegedly found on Zhang's thumb drive, said the agent examining the drive found a malicious "file" that began to install onto an agent's computer, and the agent looking at it said that had never happened before, and it was "very out of the ordinary" when conducting a criminal analysis. The agent looking at the drive had to stop the analysis and shut down his computer.



The whole story is hinky as hell, especially in the context of the parallel investigation into the alleged influence peddled by Cindy Yang, the founder of the now-famous chain of strip-mall massage parlors. Zhang herself seems alternately at sea with English and astute in her questioning about her own legal status. What we do know is that, in all things, Camp Runamuck's concept of security is a little less stringent that that provided by a pack of Shih-Tzus.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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