She filed her civil suit when Grassley got her defunded:
Gemini:
While Senator Chuck Grassley did not lead the definitive Privacy Act leak investigation that is currently central to the lawsuit, his early congressional inquiry helped inadvertently confirm the existence of the very federal files that Dr. Yanping Chen alleges were leaked.
In the months immediately following Catherine Herridge's 2017 Fox News broadcasts, Senator Grassley used the reporting to launch his own oversight inquiry. His actions and findings played out across two key phases:
1. The 2017 Congressional Letter and Inquiry
Following the Fox News broadcast, Grassley (then-Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee) sent a formal inquiry letter to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.The Objective: Grassley sought to determine if Dr. Chen had falsified immigration records to hide a past affiliation with the Chinese military, and whether she was using her university to funnel data to China.
The Resulting Impact: Grassley's open demands for her immigration and background files proved that highly specific, restrictive internal government documents regarding Dr. Chen did exist within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI. This later helped Chen's legal team argue that the records leaked to the media could only have originated from internal federal databases.
In the lawsuit Yanping Chen v. Federal Bureau of Investigation et al. (often referred to as Chen v. US Government), plaintiff Dr. Yanping Chen alleges that federal officials unlawfully leaked her private investigative records to the media, violating the Privacy Act of 1974.
The primary allegations and core details of the case include:
1. Unlawful Leak of Investigative Records
Dr. Chen alleges that personnel within federal agencies—specifically naming the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security—leaked personal and confidential files to Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge. The leaked items included snippets of her immigration forms, personal family photographs, and a summary of an FBI interview with her daughter.
2. Harm from the Resulting Media CampaignThe lawsuit claims the government leak fueled a damaging 2017 Fox News investigative series. The broadcasts suggested Dr. Chen had concealed a former role in the Chinese military on immigration forms and insinuated she used the university she founded, the University of Management and Technology (UMT), to funnel American military data to the Chinese government. Chen alleges the leak was a deliberate campaign to damage her reputation.
3. Exploitation of a Closed Investigation
Dr. Chen’s complaint highlights that the FBI had thoroughly investigated her from 2010 to 2016 regarding statements on her immigration forms. Federal prosecutors ultimately closed the case and explicitly informed her that no criminal charges would be filed. The leaks occurred roughly a year after she was cleared, resulting in public accusations of espionage without any legal basis.
Case Impact and Status
The Journalist Subpoena:
To prove her case, Chen subpoenaed the reporter, Catherine Herridge, to compel her to reveal the identity of the government leaker.Contempt Ruling: Herridge refused, citing First Amendment reporter privileges.
The federal district court and subsequently the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held Herridge in civil contempt, ruling that Chen's need for the information to pursue her Privacy Act claims outweighed the qualified journalistic privilege.
Gemini: the report on Chen and the Chinese military were documented.....
More Information from the FOX Stories at Issue:
The FBI is “reopening” its probe of a taxpayer-funded online school for military servicemembers after a six-month Fox News investigation exposed its alleged Chinese military ties, according to a senior Republican lawmaker.
"They've told us they're looking more seriously at it, that they're quote, unquote, reopening that investigation, and I hope to get some answers," retiring Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Fox News.
Reached by phone, an attorney claiming to represent the university told Fox News he’s unaware of any current criminal justice probe implicating his client. Separately, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) confirmed in a statement to Fox News that the investigation into the University of Management and Technology (UMT) "is still an active multi-agency investigation so there's nothing we can say at this point."
In 2012, the FBI raided the Rosslyn, Va.-based UMT and the home of its president, Yanping Chen Frame, a Chinese-born naturalized U.S. citizen, and her husband J. Davidson Frame, the school's academic dean.
Documents reviewed by Fox News, as well as recently unsealed court records, show the FBI focused on whether UMT's military personnel records could be remotely accessed from China, potentially compromising military histories of U.S. servicemembers, as well as Chen's alleged false statements on immigration documents that eventually allowed her to gain U.S. citizenship.
Chaffetz stressed that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is going to “take the reins” on the case from the congressional side. “I know he'll be tenacious in trying to get to the truth, but we want to know about [Yanping Chen] specifically, about what has this school been doing -- remember it’s taxpayers' funds that are going … to perpetuate this, and yet there are a lot of question marks on whether or not that data, that information, is going directly to the Chinese government."
With heavy marketing to members of the U.S. military, government records show the school has collected upwards of $250,000 per month from U.S. taxpayers via the Department of Defense (DoD) through the GI Bill and tuition-assistance programs.
Fox News’ investigation found the school's president has long-standing ties to the Chinese military or PLA (People's Liberation Army). While attending George Washington University, where her education was funded by the Chinese government, Chen wrote about her family's PLA connections, thanking her father, Chen Ben, who was a senior general in the Chinese military in charge of technology and arms acquisition. She received a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the school in 1999.
more:
Based just four miles from the Pentagon in northern Virginia is an innocuous-sounding online school for "management and technology" – which a Fox News investigation reveals has been at the center of multiple federal probes about its leadership's alleged ties to the Chinese military and whether thousands of records from U.S. service members were compromised.
The University of Management and Technology in Rosslyn, Va., which opened in 1998, touts a campus in Beijing and "partnerships" with universities around the world. The U.S. taxpayer-funded school claims to have had 5,000 graduates in the last five years and to be "especially proud of our students stationed in US military bases around the globe."
However, there is another side to the school's leadership that drew the attention of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) since at least 2012 -- and perhaps as early as 2009.
In December 2012, the FBI made two very public raids of UMT and the northern Virginia home of university president Yanping Chen Frame and its academic dean, her husband J. Davidson Frame. Documents reviewed by Fox News show it was a counter-intelligence case, known as a "200d," one of the most highly sensitive categories for a federal probe.
Photos, exclusively obtained by Fox News, appear to show Chen as a young officer in the People's Liberation Army, the military wing of China's communist party. Another photo shows Frame saluting his wife, Chen, who is holding a uniform. Three independent experts said it was a Chinese military colonel’s uniform.
"It's a bad deal for the soldiers, and it's a bad deal for the taxpayer," Stephen Rhoads, a military veteran turned whistleblower who says he worked with the FBI on the case, told Fox News in an exclusive interview. "Nobody's getting what they paid for."
Rhoads said he worked at UMT recruiting vets when the FBI approached him in 2012 regarding the federal investigation. Emails and other documents reviewed by Fox News corroborate key elements of Rhoads' story.
"One of the first sentences she [Chen] ever threw out -- after she found out I was an Army officer, was, ‘Well … I was a colonel in the army,’" Rhoads explained. "During our first face-to-face encounter, absolutely ... she did not deny it."
Rhoads said he thought Chen meant the U.S. Army, and asked whether she trained in Texas. "She laughed and said, ‘Oh, no, I was in the Chinese army, you know.’"
Chen, 64, came to the United States in 1987 from Beijing on a non-immigrant visa with her daughter Lele Wang. The Chinese government funded Chen's research at George Washington University where she received a Ph.D. in Public Policy in 1999, the year after UMT was created.
While Rhoads says Chen was upfront about her Chinese military experience, he claimed she hid those ties on immigration applications. Fox News reviewed Chen's immigration records where she consistently denied ties to the Chinese or any foreign military. When asked, "Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the communist party or any other totalitarian regime?" Chen checked "no." She would later become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Gemini:
Gemini on the Judge:
Judge Cooper is the jurist who issued the critical rulings in the case, including:
The Disclosure Order: Ruling that Dr. Chen's right to pursue her Privacy Act claim outweighed the reporter’s qualified privilege.
The Contempt Ruling: Finding journalist Catherine Herridge in civil contempt and levying the $800-a-day fine for refusing to reveal her anonymous federal government source.
Who appointed Judge Cooper?
Chen is still in the USA today.....
all information is sourced from FOX News Reports and Gemini AI.
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