13 charged in DOJ crackdown on Chinese espionage, influence campaigns

The Department of Justice on Monday announced charges against 13 individuals across three separate cases over their alleged involvement in "malign schemes" on behalf of China.

Authorities arrested two individuals, among seven facing charges, as part of an effort to "cause the forced repatriation of a PRC national residing in the United States." The DOJ unveiled the eight-count indictment on Oct. 20. The defendants in the case face accusations of surveilling and harassing a Chinese national living in U.S. as part of Beijing's "Operation Fox Hunt" that aims to extralegally repatriate Chinese individuals.

Earlier this month, news broke that China had established an "overseas police service station" in New York City to monitor its citizens while abroad and to provide them with bureaucratic and logistical support. Said station is one of at least 110 comparable facilities worldwide the regime uses to coordinate repatriation efforts, which have thus far returned an estimated 230,000 individuals to the communist country.

A further two, currently at large, individuals face charges for "attempting to obstruct a criminal prosecution in the Eastern District of New York." The indictment, unveiled Monday, identifies the defendants as intelligence officers for the People's Republic of China. 

Dong He and Zheng Wang face accusations of scheming to "steal files and other information from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York related to the ongoing federal criminal investigation and prosecution of a global telecommunications company (Company-1) based in the PRC," the DOJ press release states. They allegedly paid a $41,000 Bitcoin bribe to a government employee to this end, though that employee was in fact an FBI double agent.

The remaining four individuals face charges from a Monday indictment "in connection with a long-running intelligence campaign targeting individuals in the United States to act as agents of the PRC." In its announcement, the DOJ described a "wide-ranging and systematic effort to target and recruit individuals to act on behalf of the PRC in the United States with requests to provide information, materials, equipment, and assistance to the Chinese government in ways that would further China's intelligence objectives."

"As these cases demonstrate, the government of China sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights. They did not succeed," said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. "The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by any foreign power to undermine the Rule of Law upon which our democracy is based. We will continue to fiercely protect the rights guaranteed to everyone in our country. And we will defend the integrity of our institutions."