Michael Feinberg
Senior Editor at Lawfare covering the intelligence community and national security, and a former Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the FBI who spent most o...
“In order to dangle somebody as a potential honey trap or double agent or what have you, a lot of things have to go right in order for it to work. It's just a logistical nightmare. You have to make sure that the people originally meet in some fashion that looks organic. … There's just so many contingencies that the resources you would have to put into guaranteeing the success of something like that in a pre-planned fashion are rarely justified by the results you're going to get.”
The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026
Context
Asked whether the relationship or the Chinese intelligence recruitment came first, Feinberg says he leans toward the relationship starting on its own and the woman being recruited afterward. Engineering a honey trap in advance, he argues, is too unreliable to be worth the cost.
Transcript
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…and she somehow found information in her dealings with him and took that to the Chinese. Lots of kind of crazy stuff, but let's start with like the idea of honey pots. And, you know, one of the things that I have always thought about with honey pots and honey traps is that they are traditionally.
Yeah, my inclination is that it's the latter, that the relationship probably started first. The Chinese intelligence services became aware of it, and then they determined they could recruit her and leverage that relationship for their own benefits. And the reason is pretty simple. In order to dangle somebody as a potential honey trap or double agent or what have you, a lot of things have to go right in order for it to work. It's just a logistical nightmare. You have to make sure that the people originally meet in some fashion that looks organic. You have to bank on the fact that they're going to connect on a level that makes them want to meet again. You're going to have to bank on the fact that what might be a platonic relationship eventually becomes romantic. There's just so many contingencies that the resources you would have to put into guaranteeing the success of something like that in a pre-planned fashion are rarely justified by the results you're going to get.
No, that makes a ton of sense. And so I'm curious that if that's the case, you know, what was, if this, where has she gone? Like, what was, it looks like as recently as 2025, she was in contact with him. Do you think that he had any indication before or after that? Or do you think that there, I…
So, all right, let's take those one by one. First of all, I would not make too much of the disappearance because there's three potential factors in play. First, everything that we know about this matter is functionally coming from two news sources. The New York Times has done some reporting, and…
Yeah, I think that that's, I think that that is, I mean, that's the ongoing implications of this are massive. But in the in the very, in the most immediate kind of part of this, it seems like MegaSpeed, this multi-billion dollar corporation, essentially was able to get $4.8 billion worth of…
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