In January 2016, as part of the ongoing reform of national defense and the military, the Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Staff Department was abolished and the Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff of the Central Military Commission was established. Activities In December 1987, two Chinese military attachés working on behalf of the PLA's 2nd Department at the Chinese Embassy in Washington were caught soliciting and attempting to receive supposedly classified documents from the United States National Security Agency (NSA) given them by an undercover FBI agent in a Chinese restaurant not far from FBI headquarters. Protected by diplomatic immunity, the two agents, Hou Desheng and Zhang Weichu were asked to leave the country and did so "after finishing their tenures in the United States" according to the Chinese Consulate General in Chicago. In 1996, Chinese Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, an executive at China Aerospace International Holdings princeling daughter of Admiral Liu Huaqing ("Father of the Chinese Navy", former Navy Commander-in-Chief, former Vice-Chairman of the CMC, and member of the Politburo Standing Committee) introduced Taiwanese-born naturalized American Johnny Chung to the then head of the PLA's 2nd Department Major General Ji Shengde, the princeling son of Ji Pengfei, China's foreign minister during U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. In violation of U.S. campaign finance laws, Ji provided Chung $300,000 USD of 2nd Department funds to donate to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in support of incumbent President Bill Clinton's 1996 election campaign and told him "We like your president very much. We would like to see him reelect [sic]. I will give you $300,000 US dollars. You can give it to the president and the Democrat [sic] Party." After providing testimony to the FBI and a House Committee, Chung was eventually convicted of bank fraud, tax evasion, and two misdemeanor counts of conspiring to violate election law in one of the more prominent cases of the 1996 campaign finance controversy. Both the Chinese government and Liu Chaoying flatly denied the accusations and faced no apparent consequences from the incident. Ji, however, was quietly reassigned from his role as director of the 2nd Department to a lower position at a military research center. Ji's exact role or whether he was authorized to spend the Department's money on Clinton's campaign were never clarified. In February 1999, Chinese citizen Yao Yi, who was in the employ