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.
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.