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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

These are Chinese nationals working for a Chinese company in Africa. Why is the US DOJ involved?

If I were to guess, they have connections to American customers, supplies, investors or whatever who might be implicated in some sort of wrongdoing, breaking American laws.

There is no mention in the article of any such thing though.

Basically, there are just these tidbits:

1. Mr. Ye has rubbed shoulders with some famous Americans, like Allen Greenspan and Henry Kissinger.

2. Mr. Ye's think tank has some relationship with the UN and has organized conferences that that "have featured senior American military officials and Chinese People’s Liberation Army generals." (That being relayed information evidently gleaned from that think tank's website itself.)

So I think we have to fall back on general observations about US being the self-appointed policeman to the world. If anyone is bribing anyone's ass anywhere, and it ruffles U.S. feathers for any reason (like some U.S. ventures in that area are disadvantaged), it's a US DOJ matter!

It’s stated within the first 4 sentences of the article...

The part where he flew to New York? So what?

It doesn't mention that the meetings involved any Americans, or were about anything dealings in the USA, or involving USA people outside of the USA.

(Maybe that is the case, but it's not in this particular article.)

It says the meetings happened at the UN, with which he has an official affiliation. UN headquarters has a special relationship with NY (and the US) and generally there is immunity involved and no ability for the US to refuse a visa. This was a key carve out for locating the UN secretariat in NYC.

You can't fly to the UN with your official affiliation to commit crimes. That's not the way that diplomatic immunity works.

It really is though. In most cases all they can do is kick you out. In some cases the foreign government can waive immunity to allow prosecution, but it’s rare. This guy wasn’t a diplomat though so diplomatic immunity doesn’t apply. Regardless of that, my understanding from having grown up going to an international school in NYC where most of my friends were there because their parents were assigned to the UN, is that there’s a weaker form of effective immunity that basically is just that the UN grounds are not trivially part of the US. So it’s not clear to me why US bribery laws applied to a foreign national on foreign business inside the UN? My guess is that the practical answer is just that the US are world police and so they do what they want.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_immunity

Used US banks, maybe a US based corp was bidding and was harmed by the bribe, the crime was committed /planed in USA...etc etc.

But they pass a law and they get you. And the law is legal in USA because the bribe affected commerce, even if you bought a harddrive that crossed state lines while coming to you (not a lawyer, but I think that's FBI's golden goose http://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/commerce-com... )

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