A jury is considering the case of a former New York City Police Department sergeant and two other men accused of stalking a family in New Jersey on behalf of the Chinese government after their two-week trial set to begin Thursday in federal court in New Jersey. Brooklyn has been completed.
The defendants are Michael McMahon, the retired sergeant, 55; Zhu Yong, who is also known as Jason Zhu, 66; and Zheng Congying, 27. The latter two are Chinese citizens with US green cards. The men are accused of playing a vital role in Operation Fox Hunt, a global Beijing initiative that the Justice Ministry says is part of the authoritarian government’s efforts to control the diaspora.
The victims included Xu Jin, a former government official in Wuhan, his wife Liu Fang and other relatives. They moved to the United States more than a decade ago, and Chinese authorities later accused Mr. Xu of corruption and embezzlement.
“This was a relentless campaign by the Chinese government to frighten Xu Jin and Liu Fang into returning to China,” Meredith Arfa, one of the plaintiffs, said in her closing statement.
Ms. Arfa said that each of the defendants “knowingly participated in that campaign. They patrolled, they stalked, they threatened and they were terrified.”
This is the first federal lawsuit in the United States involving Operation Fox Hunt. The jury will have to sift through hundreds of pages of evidence, transcripts, videos and telephone records to determine whether the government has proved its case.
Costs
Mr. Xu, his wife and his sister-in-law said they were followed in the New Jersey suburbs, receiving threats and harassment online. The people who chased them first targeted Ms. Liu’s sister in Short Hills, NJ, because they did not know Mr. Xu’s address.
Prosecutors explained how Mr. Zhu Mr. McMahon in late 2016 with the help of a translation agency, then sent him instructions to monitor and retrieve files. Mr. McMahon enlisted other investigators to help him with the job, while exchanging messages with people from the “company” that hired him.
In 2017, Chinese officials forced Mr. Xu to fly from China to find out where Mr. Xu lived and to persuade him to return to the country, prosecutors said. The officials enlisted Mr. McMahon to supervise during that trip in an attempt to find out where Mr. Xu lived. The following year, Mr. Zheng was one of two people who left a threatening note on the front door of Mr. Xu’s house.
First charged in 2020, the trio faces charges including acting as a foreign agent without notifying and colluding to the Attorney General to do so, as well as interstate stalking.
The case of the defense
Defense lawyers argued that the three men were unaware that the Chinese government was in charge of finding Mr. Xu. Lawrence Lustberg, representing Mr. McMahon, argued that it was not reasonable to think that his client would have known in any way.
“There is no direct evidence that Michael McMahon knew he was working for China,” Lustberg said.
Mr. Zhu, the middleman who hired Mr. McMahon, was a retiree who did not speak English. His attorney, Kevin Tung, said Mr. Zhu effectively ended after killing Mr. McMahon and Hu Ji, a Chinese police officer, contacted the Wuhan Public Security Bureau, when Mr. Hu was visiting from China.
A photo of the three men at a Panera Bread restaurant in New Jersey was shown repeatedly during the trial. Mr. Hu started emailing Mr. McMahon directly using a fake name, “Eric Yan”.
mr. McMahon had his own private investigative agency after years on the force. He was hired on the pretext that a private company in China wanted to recover stolen money from someone who had engaged in embezzlement, Mr. Lustberg said. Finally, he conducted surveillance for five days for six months in 2016 and 2017, he said.
Paul Goldberger, representing Mr. Zheng, said his client was “just a kid” involved in the scheme for less than a day when he drove another young man to New Jersey in September 2018. front door, but Mr. Goldberger argued that Mr. Zheng realized it was a mistake and returned the next day to remove it. Mr. Xu had already done so, as instructed by the FBI
Why it matters
The Brooklyn office of U.S. attorney Breon S. Peace has increasingly focused on what it calls “transnational repression,” especially in cases involving China. Last year, the agency charged five people in connection with attempts to spy on or intimidate Chinese-American dissidents.
In April, the office announced that two people had been charged with operating an undeclared Chinese police station in lower Manhattan. Two other cases announced the same day targeted Chinese police officers accused of harassing people in the New York area, and officials accused of directing a China-based Zoom employee to harass dissidents of the platform. to delete.
Justice Department officials have been outspoken about what they say are illegal activities by the Chinese government on American soil to silence Communist Party critics.
In March, the FBI and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center issued a public message warned that repressive foreign regimes, including China and Iran, were attempting to use US local police and private investigators to attack dissidents.