In January, 2016, perhaps in the hope of rekindling a longstanding relationship between the Clintons and the Chinese, Hillary Clinton’s top policy advisors were in communication with the Chinese Communist Ambassador while she was campaigning for the presidency.

Campbell wanted to discuss an invitation for coffee at Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai’s house and possibly returning the invitation. This was at a time when Hillary was talking about pivoting to Asia and the Chinese were building islands, laying claim to the South China Sea.

Kurt Campbell, the architect of America’s pivot to Asia, was to be next secretary of state under President Clinton.

These types of meetings between presidential campaign members and foreign officials are not unusual. The outrage over Michael Flynn having a conversation with the Russian ambassador was, on the other hand, unusual and unjust.

The Clintons, however, have a long illicit history with the Chinese

In 2013, a Chinese donor who gave $2 million to the Clinton Foundation appeared to also have contributed $120,000 to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign that same year.

The donor was Wang Wenliang, a former delegate to the Chinese parliament, the Chinese Communist government in other words. He controls several Chinese firms, including Rilin Enterprises and Dandong Port Co.”

“According to CNN’s report, the FBI considered investigating the Clinton Foundation after a bank flagged one of the charity’s donor for ‘suspicious activity,’” we concluded.

Far more serious was Chinagate.

To understand the possible corruption in the Clinton’s relationship with the Chinese, one must go back to the two scandalous foreign operations that influenced U.S. elections – one in 1996 and another possibly in 1992.

President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign received millions of dollars in illegal contributions from a wealthy Chinese donor that were channeled through the Democratic National Committee, according to a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform report. In return, Bill Clinton turned over U.S. weapons technology to China.

Those attempts to influence elections involved agents from Communist China who sought to help Bill Clinton get reelected in 1996 by donating millions of dollars illegally to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Clinton’s relationship with the Chinese goes back prior to the 1992 election through James Riady, of the Riady banking family of Indonesia and China.

According to congressional investigations that occurred in the late-1990s, the Riady family made illegal donations to Clinton’s 1992 campaign and wielded influence over the U.S. policy toward China.

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton was a harsh critic of then-President George H. W. Bush for what he called “coddling the butchers of Beijing.”

But video later turned up in a 1999 documentary “Trading with the Enemy: How the Clinton Administration Armed China” that shows surreptitiously recorded video of a Clinton associate in China in October of 1992, with a letter from then-Gov. Clinton. That associate, Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie, is seen telling government officials in China that Bill Clinton “wants to invest in China.”

He certainly did invest.

From the moment Clinton took office in January 1993, he decontrolled advanced strategic weapons technology to China over the objections of his own Department of Defense Export Control Regime, and his own Director of Central Intelligence.

Those practices continued through to the 1996 campaign.

The “Chinagate” fundraising scandal plagued the 1996 Bill Clinton-Al Gore campaign.

Chinagate aka Commercegate is the most serious scandal in U.S. history. It involves the transfer of America’s most sensitive technology, including but not limited to nuclear missile and satellite technology, apparently in exchange for millions of dollars in contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort and the Democratic National Committee.

The “China/Democratic National Committee Fundraising Scandal”, as it was also known, turned up startling details of how deep the Chinese penetration of the Clinton Administration was.

All of this was documented in congressional reports on the subject and by nearly every major news agency as well as in the documentary “Trading with the Enemy.”

The Department of Justice investigation under Attorney General Janet Reno sounds familiar to our present day. Reno steadfastly refused to appoint an independent counsel to investigate despite demands not only from Congress, but from her own FBI Director, Louis J. Freeh, and Charles LaBella, a senior U.S. Attorney whom Reno appointed to oversee the investigation. The Reno Justice Department indicted several figures in the money laundering scandal.

In a case of great injustice, those who became the most important witnesses for the government’s case received the harshest penalties, while those who kept quiet and handled the most laundered funds were let off with virtually no punishment at all.

At the time, Republican Congressman Dick Armey suggested that the Clinton weapons technology transfers to China, while he was receiving millions of dollars in contributions from Chinese agents, amounted to “treason.”

Unfortunately, Democrats and their publicity arm – the mainstream media – are giving the wrong impression about which candidate has the tightest connection to a foreign government’s influence over an American election.