The same D.C. judge who has spent the last two years trying to handcuff President Trump on deportations spent nine years playing host to Chinese law students from a program underwritten by a Chinese Communist Party influence shop. Six of those visits landed while he sat on the secret FISA court. One of them landed while he ran it.
This didn’t come from some conspiracy theory Telegram channel. It is on the program’s own host lists.
Natalie Winters published the documents Thursday. The Western Journal put them in front of a wider audience the same afternoon. Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is listed as a “9X Host” of the U.S.-Asia Institute’s Szymanski Rule of Law program for Chinese law students. The years are 2015 through 2020, then 2022, 2023, and 2024.
His FISA term ran from May 2014 to May 2021. He was the court’s presiding judge from January 2020 until that term ended. Do the arithmetic. Six of the nine hosting credits sit inside the window when he was reading the government’s most sensitive foreign-intelligence applications. The 2020 session was online. The rest were not a Zoom seminar. A 2015 program photo shows Boasberg on the bench with Chinese fellows standing at the dais beside him.
Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?
The program’s own 2023 recruitment flyer, published through Tsinghua University, states the obvious that polite Washington pretends not to see. “The program is also underwritten by the China-United States Exchange Foundation.”
That is CUSEF, the Hong Kong outfit founded by Tung Chee-hwa, the former Hong Kong chief executive who spent nearly two decades as a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. That body is not a chamber of commerce. It is a pillar of the CCP’s United Front system.
House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar said as much in a November 2025 letter telling Columbia University to cut the cord. CUSEF, he wrote, is “an instrument of the CCP’s approach to political warfare.” Groups like it help Beijing “identify foreigners who the party could exploit.”
The University of Texas had already rejected CUSEF money for the same reason. William Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee he ended Carnegie’s relationship with the foundation because officials were “increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations.” Two years after that testimony, CUSEF’s name was still on the flyer recruiting Chinese students for a Washington program that listed Boasberg as a host.
The flyer promised “exclusive conversations with influential actors” and a chance to watch proceedings “few are ever able to witness firsthand.” Applicants had to be Chinese citizens studying law in China. Lodging was near the Capitol and the Supreme Court. That is not cultural tourism. That is access.
The program did not wander into existence by accident. Winters notes that Matthew Szymanski built it with Sun Chao, then the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai’s Minhang District. A CCP official helped pick the students. The United Front has been called the Party’s “magic weapon” for a reason.
It mixes flattery, dinners, photographs, and long-term cultivation. One USAI alumni letter even bragged that a 2011 fellow stayed in touch with a D.C. judge afterward and received “tremendous support” in her personal and professional life.
Friendship is the product. Access is the inventory.
Boasberg was not the only name on the roster, and that is supposed to be the defense. Later Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared while they were still on lower courts. Two times, three times, four times. The 2024 list also put Rep. Rashida Tlaib down as a host and tagged Wendell Primus, a longtime senior adviser to Nancy Pelosi, as a seven-time host.
A crowded guest list does not clean the money. It shows how thoroughly this town trained itself to treat a United Front vehicle as another line on a summer schedule. Columbia kept courting CUSEF into late 2025. Elite schools still take the trips. Judges still take the photos. Then everyone acts shocked when Beijing knows which offices to knock on.
Boasberg is an Obama appointee to the federal bench and a Bush appointee to D.C. Superior Court before that. Chief Justice John Roberts put him on FISA in 2014 and later made him presiding judge. That court is where the government goes when it wants to watch a foreign target, and sometimes when it wants to watch an American it has dressed up as one.
While he held that gavel, an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith admitted he altered a CIA email used to keep a FISA warrant alive on Carter Page. Boasberg sentenced him to probation and community service. No prison. The man who ran the court that rubber-stamped the Russia-collusion surveillance then told the only official who pleaded guilty that a “media hurricane” had already punished him enough.
Just the News later noted the same judge went on to block Trump deportation flights and pick fights the Supreme Court had to unwind.
So the public is asked to believe two things at once. First, that a judge with top-secret FISA access can host Chinese law students nine times from a CCP-funded pipeline and it is just civics class. Second, that the same judge is the last adult in the room when the elected president tries to remove foreign criminals from American soil.
Winters closed her report by calling for a federal counterespionage look at the relationship. That is the sober ask. Not a cartoon. A records pull. Who paid. Who sat in the room. What was said off the schedule. Whether any of those fellows later landed in ministries, United Front shops, or state-security work. Judges do not get to plead naivete after the House China committee, U.S. intelligence officials, and a CIA director have already labeled the sponsor.
Beijing does not spend this kind of money for souvenirs. It spends it to map the people who sign warrants, halt planes, and teach the next class of American lawyers what “the rule of law” is supposed to mean. Nine visits is not a courtesy. It is a pattern. And a FISA judge who kept showing up for it does not get to lecture the country about prudence.
