Posted on 05/26/2023 5:39:15 PM PDT by Right Wing Vegan
Two men working on behalf of the Chinese government’s Ministry of Public Security attempted to bribe an IRS agent in a scheme intended to further Beijing’s harassment of Falun Gong believers, the Justice Department revealed in a criminal complaint unveiled today.
The defendants were arrested today in California on charges including acting as unregistered foreign agents, money laundering, and bribery.
“The Chinese government has yet again attempted, and failed, to target critics of the PRC here in the United States,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement this afternoon. “The Justice Department will continue to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute efforts by the PRC government to silence its critics and extend the reaches of its regime onto U.S. soil,” he added.
A criminal complaint filed by federal prosecutors describes the plot by defendants John Chen and Lin Feng to pay an IRS agent to get the agency to strip a Falun Gong nonprofit group of its tax-exempt status. Chen and Feng are both Los Angeles residents, while the former is a U.S. citizen, and the latter is a Chinese citizen.
Starting in January, Chen planned the scheme, saying that it could further the Chinese government’s aim to “topple” the Falun Gong, a religious minority that has been relentlessly persecuted by Beijing. “Falun Gong practitioners across China are subject to widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and torture, and they are at a high risk of extrajudicial execution,” Freedom House found in a 2017 report.
According to the court documents, Chen and Feng worked with a Chinese-government official to submit a whistleblower complaint to the IRS, alleging that the Falun Gong group was abusing its nonprofit status.
While the Justice Department does not say this outright, Christopher Essick, the FBI agent who wrote the criminal complaint, strongly suggests that a Tianjin-based officer with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s 610 Office coordinated the plot. That cell is tasked with carrying out Beijing’s repression campaigns against Falun Gong practitioners. More onChina How the Bidens Got Rich China’s Coming Decline Biden’s Foolish China Optimism Runs into Reality
Earlier this month, the two defendants allegedly met with an undercover officer who pretended to be an IRS agent involved with the tax agency’s whistleblower program. They promised to pay the person they thought was an IRS agent $50,000 to open an audit into the Falun Gong organization.
Under that program, the IRS pays people whose whistleblower claims are acted upon by the agency. Essick wrote in the complaint that the report submitted by Chen and Feng would likely not have otherwise resulted in the elimination of the Falun Gong group’s nonprofit status.
This month, Chen and Feng each traveled to China and returned with thousands of dollars in cash to use in the bribery scheme. Before his arrest, Chen told the undercover officer on May 18 that he and Feng would travel to China a few more times this summer to bring back money for the bribe.
The Justice Department is currently prosecuting several other Chinese-government transnational repression cases, most of which comprise efforts to stalk and harass Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. Last month, prosecutors announced charges against two New Yorkers for operating an illegal Chinese police station in Manhattan.
The scheme announced today is also not the first time that alleged Chinese agents have tried to use bribery to infiltrate U.S.-government agencies and advance harassment plots. Other cases brought in 2022 by federal prosecutors have seen the attempted use of bribes to procure sensitive DOJ documents about the prosecution of Huawei and to obtain personal information about U.S.-based dissidents.
Stupid Chinese. They would have gotten away with it if they had bribed Biden.
By coincidence, or not this guy (probably also in LA) also is named John Chen: DWP executive placed on leave amid questions about outside bitcoin business
They wanted to save money. Not that they needed to, it's just that when you pay a bribe to The Big Guy you lose face to your friend Qiang who got the same thing done paying a smaller bribe elsewhere to get the same thing done.
Chinese go absolutely nuts in this game of "I paid less than you did." Absolutely brain spinning upside down in skull nuts.
Are we sure these guys at the IRS didn’t take the money?
Gropin’ Joe didn’t get his usual cut?
When civil lawsuits result in awards into the hundreds of millions for individuals, a fine to the CCP into the hundreds of billions for this malfeasance would be on a just scale.
(10% for the big guy, of course.)
So where do the interests of the Biden admin and the Chicoms diverge? Except for the Chicoms needing pliant customers for their cheap, shoddy junk, both have no problems with seeing America collapse.
Another Red Chinese intelligence agency operation in the U.S.
Meanwhile Rep. Red Judy Chu (D-Ca) called herself “a daughter of China”, meaning she was a supporter of them “inside the belly of the beast”.
They are only reporting and taking action on the UNSUCCESSFUL bribery attempts.
Has anyone else noticed Garland making very recent attacks on his natural constituency like Sen Menendez and communist China, and the Tucker Carlson video leader? Here he can say he is unbiased, but of course they never touch the the real corruption within the FBI,IRS CIA and Biden administration. Hunter laughs all the way to the Eastern Europe whore house where spies go through his phone.
Related organizations (that China doesn’t like):
https://en.falundafa.org/index.html (Falun Dafa/Falun Gong)
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