Those meetings, which were normal for the way US-Taiwan diplomatic relations are handled in Washington and which were a big part of the FBI's original case against Keyser last year, did not figure in Keyser's guilty plea.
However, they led to Keyser's arrest in September last year outside a Washington-area restaurant in which the three had just had lunch. Shortly after the arrest. Cheng left Washington for Taiwan.
As a consequence of the FBI investigations that followed those meetings, FBI agents raided Keyser's home and allegedly found large numbers of classified documents among Keyser's papers and computer files.
The US attorney's office in northern Virginia, where the case was brought, said FBI investigators found more than 3,600 documents in Keyser's home, including more than 25 classified as top secret and "numerous" others classified as secret or confidential that Keyser allegedly brought home as early as 1992.
It is those documents, not the Cheng relationship, that led to the charge of removing classified US documents.
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