A man pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday to charges that he had worked as an unauthorized agent of the Chinese government, running a police outpost in Lower Manhattan as part of an effort to quash criticism of Beijing.
The man, Chen Jinping, was accused last year of helping to run the unauthorized Chinese police outpost and of hiding his activities from the federal government by not registering as a foreign agent. Mr. Chen was charged along another man, Lu Jianwang, also known as Harry Lu.
Federal prosecutors said that when the men learned of an investigation into the outpost, they destroyed text messages they had exchanged with their handler at China’s Ministry of Public Security in October 2022, around the time that the F.B.I. searched the six-story building in Chinatown that housed the operation.
In court, Mr. Chen admitted through an interpreter that he had “agreed with others to act as an agent of a foreign government” and that he was not registered as a foreign agent, as legally required. Mr. Lu has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Both men are American citizens.
As Mr. Chen spoke to the court, his son and daughter sat in the front row of the gallery watching.
The pleading on Wednesday is the latest in the Justice Department’s initiative to stop efforts by the Chinese government to wield its influence secretly across the United States. The efforts have been driven especially in recent years by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which has been headed by Breon Peace.
“A priority of my office has been to counteract the malign activities of foreign governments that violate our nation’s sovereignty by targeting local diaspora communities,” Mr. Peace said in a news release.
Authorities have said that the recent cases show a worldwide effort by the Chinese government to suppress criticism and intimidate dissidents. And at the time, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn said the case represented the first time criminal charges had been brought in connection with such a police outpost.
In September, the office charged Linda Sun, who had worked in high levels of New York state government, becoming deputy chief of staff to Gov. Kathy Hochul, accepting years of payoffs in exchange for helping China and its Communist Party.
Earlier this year, Shujun Wang, 75, a Queens man who billed himself as a democracy activist and scholar, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court of acting as a spy for the Communist Party. And last summer, prosecutors won a case in the same court against three men who had stalked a family in New Jersey on behalf of the Chinese government.
It is unclear what stance the incoming Trump administration will take in similar cases. Mr. Peace said Wednesday that he would leave his position on Jan. 10, making way for President-elect Donald J. Trump to name a new top prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York.
But on Wednesday, Mr. Peace notched another win when Mr. Chen pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an illegal agent of a foreign government, a charge that carries a maximum of five years in prison.
Mr. Chen said that, acting on China’s behest, he had tried to kill an news article published online. The article, according to the indictment, was published in 2022 on a Chinese-language website, FJSEN.com, and focused on the establishment of the police outpost in Manhattan. Mr. Chen was assigned to remove the article from FJSEN.com, prosecutors said, and after contacting the person operating the site, he succeeded.
When authorities announced the prosecution of Mr. Lu and Mr. Chen, they also disclosed two related cases, including one against 34 Chinese police officers accused of harassing Chinese nationals who lived in the New York area. The other was against eight Chinese officials accused of directing a Zoom employee based in China to remove dissidents from the platform.
Before Mr. Chen and Mr. Lu were charged, authorities searched the outpost at the six-story building, located at 107 East Broadway, a move that intensified resistance against China’s efforts to police its diaspora far beyond its borders.
Although Chinese officials have said that the outposts are not doing police work, Irish, Canadian and Dutch officials have called on Beijing to shut down similar operations in their jurisdictions.
According to court papers, the Manhattan operation was overseen by a branch of the Ministry of Public Security called the Fuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau.
In 2018 I.R.S. filings, Mr. Lu was listed as the president of a nonprofit organization whose offices housed the police outpost. Prosecutors said that the group was formed in 2013 and that it described its charitable mission as offering a “social gathering place” for people from the city of Fuzhou. Mr. Lu was general adviser of the organization and Mr. Chen was its secretary general, according to the complaint filed last year.
None of the people working at the outpost registered with the attorney general as agents of the Chinese government, prosecutors said. However, an investigation found photos that showed a banner behind the leaders of the outpost that read: “Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, New York, U.S.A.”
According to prosecutors, since the outpost opened in February 2022, a Chinese official at least once ordered people there to help find someone, a person identified in the indictment as Victim-3. That person told investigators of being harassed with phone calls and social media messages by people who the victim believed were acting on behalf of China. The person told the investigators that once, after delivering a “pro-democracy speech,” his vehicle was broken into.
Investigators found communications between Chinese officials and staff members at the outpost, including Mr. Chen, according to the complaint.
However, when investigators interviewed Mr. Chen, he said that he did not know any Chinese government officials, according to the complaint. During a voluntary interview with F.B.I. agents, he went to the bathroom, where an agent followed him and warned him through a bathroom door against deleting text messages. But messages the agents knew he had exchanged with Mr. Lu and Chinese officials had disappeared.
The post Man Who Ran Secret Police Office in New York Admits He Was Chinese Agent appeared first on New York Times.
